On December 29th, 2015, I hit a car.
It wasn’t a huge crash or anything like that, and thankfully, no one got hurt. Still, it was the first accident I had ever gotten into, and it’s safe to say it shook me up quite a bit.
At the time, I was just hoping to get some driving practice done before the Christmas Break ended. Armed with my student permit—I didn’t even have a license yet, which was the entire reason I needed practice in the first place—and accompanied by my driver, I began making my way around the Ortigas area. I had driven around the area a few times before without incident, but this time would be a different story.
Maybe my reflexes were a little rusty, or maybe my mind was on something else. Either way, as I sought to make a U-turn, I didn’t quite turn the wheel as hard as I should have, and instead of smoothly turning around the bend, the car went a little wide. The next thing I knew, the side of another car was straight ahead of me. I hit the brakes as soon as my brain understood what was happening, but I was moments too slow—the front of my car had hit the front fender of the blue Toyota Vios in front of me.
Now, anyone who’s been in this situation before knows what happens next. The two cars stop moving, causing a backlog of traffic, and a whole lot of angry honking. The driver of the Toyota Vios steps out and asks what the heck I was doing—I apologize, explain that I’m still learning, and apologize some more. Eventually, an officer comes and escorts us to a police station where we file a police report. The other driver is understanding, but justifiably stressed—he was on the way to a party, and I have just scratched a two-week old company car.
While this sequence of events may not be out of the ordinary for anyone who drives regularly, I didn’t exactly have a lot of experience on the road. I knew I had caused a great deal of stress to a large number of people that day—to this other driver, who would have to file a report to the company he worked for and get the car’s scratches removed, to my parents, who would have to shoulder the cost of damages, and even to the large number of people impeded by the traffic jam I had caused. Not only that, it was stress that could have been easily avoided had I been paying a little more attention.
To put it bluntly, at that exact moment, in the face of all the angry honking, I felt very, very stupid.
Later that evening, I joked that I was traumatized by the event and by my own stupidity, and that I didn’t want to drive again. It had a sliver of truth in it—I was certainly afraid that the next time I stepped behind the wheel, I might do something irresponsible and again be the cause of so much hassle and annoyance. But funnily enough, everyone gave me the same advice. The other driver, my parents, the police official, the driver who accompanied me—they all told me to keep driving, and in fact, to drive again the very next day.
And so I did. Thankfully, I didn’t hit anyone this time.
But I guess the moral of this story—besides watching your U-turns—is that it does no one any good to wallow in self-pity after making a mistake. After all, everyone screws up. Everyone makes stupid, easily avoidable errors. Sometimes, we end up being the cause of everyone else’s stress and annoyance. But in cases like these, it certainly doesn’t help if all we do is just mope around in our own misery.
For a lot of us, it’s our natural reaction to shut down after screwing up. These mistakes can happen anywhere—a car accident, a sports play gone wrong, or a group project unattended to. And when we make errors, the kind that affect the people around us, we often feel rather stupid. In instances like these, it’s perfectly natural to feel bad. It’s respectful to apologize. But when all we do is apologize, and feel bad, and apologize some more, we help nobody. It becomes our job to learn from our errors so as not to repeat them again. We owe it to the people around us to snap out of whatever misery we’re feeling, and to instead contribute what we can towards solving the situation.
After the accident, I didn’t exactly trust myself to take the wheel again. But in retrospect, that was my own self-degradation talking. Refusing to drive after the incident wouldn’t have helped anyone, and would probably just cause more frustration for everyone involved.
I’m not saying that the next time you make a mistake—a failed exam, a forgotten chore, or a slip-up on stage—you’re not allowed to feel bad. You are, but remember to give yourself a little break. We are, after all, only human at the end of the day, and if we didn’t forgive ourselves for every error committed, we would be carrying a whole lot of self-loathing everywhere we went. We spend so much time after making a grievous mistake trying to express our remorse, but this is rarely what we should be doing. Instead, we should learn how to cut ourselves some slack, shake off whatever depression we might be feeling, and resolve to better the situation we’re in.
