Learning from Mistakes

I have made mistakes in the past. Do I get mad at myself for making them? Yes. But I am thankful at the same time. I read in a textbook in my leadership class that mistakes should be looked at positively. We can learn a tremendous amount from our mistakes. In my case, this is clear as day. For if I hadn’t gotten my last OWI, I wouldn’t have taken the steps I needed to understand what my true problem was.

After reading The Power of Self-Esteem by Nathanial Branden, I started understanding the deeper issues I was experiencing. After a few months of meditation on his concepts and incorporating the principles of Buddhism, I started to really put things together. I realized that it starts as a child. It starts with uncertainty when parents inadvertently confuse us as to the right and wrong things to say and do. I realized that with alcoholism in my family and seeing adults take anti-anxiety and anti-depression pills, that I only knew how to drown out problems with mood-altering chemicals. From early on, I started using such things to topically ease my worries – worries and problems that many children don’t have. This is the only way I knew to “solve” my problems, even if only temporary.

To add to my fragile self-esteem, I started dating a boy when I was only a freshmen in high school, a very fragile age.  He knew how to say just the right things to make me feel worthless. My jokes were not funny, I was stupid, I made bad decisions, all I ever did was complain. But he had sex with me. He made me feel “wanted.” We always fought, tooth and nail. But I was convinced that I was ugly and worthless and, as I told my friends and family, I didn’t think I could get any better. When we had the worst fights, the ones where he hit me and choked me and locked me out of my house, he, quite easily, convinced me that calling the cops would do nothing for me. It was his house, as he often reminded me even though I lived there with him, and the cops would do nothing about it.  I sought attention from other men, and it made me feel better if only for a few days, but I still was too scared to leave. When I became pregnant, I felt that I was now stuck there forever.

However, eventually I was convinced by people who actually loved me that I was worth something. I could make it on my own. I could find someone who loved me and treated me with respect. What was respect? I didn’t know. I had grown up without it and without knowledge of it. Finally, one day, I broke free. I took my son and a few belongings and fled.

I now had broken the daily one-on-one abuse that I experienced in person, even if I still got hateful text messages. This is when I started learning that I was a better person than I thought. However, I had not yet discovered Buddhism or read about the healing powers of the mind. This would not happen until after I was caught again for drinking and driving. I lost my license for a year. I was treated as an imbecile. I was one. But I was about to do something about it.

I discovered Buddhism. I started reading anything I could get my hands on. I stopped drinking so much. What did I learn, though? Well, I learned that I had no idea how to handle stress or personal problems. All I knew was to drink or take the anti-anxiety pills that my doctor prescribed so effortlessly after a five-minute conversation. From Buddhism, I learned that I had an awful lot of bad karma. I needed to start producing only good karma, and I had to endure the suffering I caused myself from the bad karma. I learned that I need to have compassion for every living being, even my enemies in order to end the cycle of hate that we are all in at one point or another. I learned that we often cannot control what happens to us, but we can control how we react to it. We can decide to be in a good mood or a bad mood. We have the right to get angry or upset, but those with true self-esteem do not let that define their lives.

After putting these concepts into practice, I can truly say that I am a genuinely happy person. Consequently, I never feel the urge to indulge in alcohol. I now love myself, and I know that I have to make the right decisions to have a worthwhile self-esteem. I have changed completely. I have changed for the better.