IWTL I Want To Learn

If the reason you don't want to speak to an adult for guidance is because there aren't any you find trustworthy or who know how to communicate effectively with you, I think the best way to learn from your mistakes is to look for the patterns around them. Then, shift your perspective from being the person who made the mistake to being someone on the receiving end of it--walk a mile in someone else's shoes to understand them better and all that. For me, I found getting to know myself a really important part of this: I had to know what I was like when I felt my best and worst to recognize the things that went wrong before I made a mistake. It took me until adulthood just to recognize that I have a slow-to-warm personality and tend to be inflexible, which means that any unexpected changes really fuck my shit up and can lead to me making mistakes because I feel like I'm scrambling to adapt. Give me an extra minute or three to live with it and I'm fine; don't give me the extra time, and I'll probably be nasty towards you even if you don't deserve it. Recognizing those patterns in my own behavior lets me say, "Hold on, I need a few before I can do what you want" instead of, "Are you fucking kidding me? You're doing this again?" (which, it turns out, upsets the people who are so ready to demand I do something flawlessly and on their schedule instead of mine, lol).

Looking for the underlying causes of mistakes is like tracking down clues to solve a mystery. Maybe you missed a throw because your hands were sweaty and the ball was slippery, or maybe you miss a throw because your mind was busy trying to work on a different problem while you were throwing a ball. Maybe an unexpected gust of wind blew the ball in a different direction than you were expecting it to go; mistakes aren't always because of things that we can control, so it's important to be fair and kind to yourself when you're looking for these patterns behind them and recognizing when something isn't your mistake.

It's way too easy to get wrapped up in the idea that making mistakes makes you a failure or a bad person. Nah, they just mean that you're doing something you're not used to doing perfectly. Nobody just hops on a bicycle and rides off into the sunset on their first try. It's a skill that takes practice. There are tons of skills like that that most people don't think of as needing practice before you get good at them: making friends, being a good friend, creating emotional boundaries, saying no, saying yes, asking for help, washing dishes, fixing a leaky pipe, emotional regulation, apologizing, forgiving, driving... it's a long list, but you get the idea. Being bad at a skill is a temporary thing, and making mistakes is how you figure out how to improve.