How To: Survive Teenagehood

23/ It's Not Worth Your Tears

I don't know if this is just me, but I seem to obsess over things that I do wrong in life. I beat myself up about things that I've done, and I'm well aware that I don't need to be so hard on myself. There are always times in life where we're always too hard on ourselves, and we upset ourselves by chiding ourselves.

I've made a few big blunders in the past few days to do with my GCSEs (including missing out a whole section of my geography GCSE), and I've sobbed and weeped about them. 'What if I had...' runs through my mind all the time, and I have to physically stop these thoughts from engulfing me.

And that's what we have to do. We have to push our mistakes in the past, and only learn from them, as cliche as that sounds. In a few months that mistake you made yesterday won't mean anything, and you'll barely remember making it. You can't change the past, nothing can, and you have to look ahead. Why focus on past mistakes when you can stop yourself making future mistakes?

If you flunked that test, said something weird by accident, even did something as trivial as play your music out loud when you didn't mean to, don't overthink it. Acknowledge that you didn't want to do that thing, and move on. You will only feel terrible if you focus on the past, trust me. A few days ago I didn't think I could even sit in the exam hall again after making the biggest academic mistake of my life, one that could potentially affect a big part of my life, and I walked out my physics exam today already thinking of tomorrow.

You can't cringe about your past mistakes forever. It's easy to, but don't sink into that pit.

So rule twenty three of surviving Teenagehood: put it in perspective, people have probably made way bigger mistakes than you.