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Growth Means Acknowledging Your Mistakes Out Loud

 Rebeca Salinas is a second year social work student. She uses she/her pronouns and identifies as a gay Chicana. As a result of her love for talking and socializing, the roles she plays on campus include Ordal RA & Latinx Unidos Ambassador. 







Growth Means Acknowledging Your Mistakes Out Loud


Everyone has things they have to apologize for. However, being put in a position where you have to willingly accept responsibility for something negative can be discouraging and even embarrassing. As a prideful person myself, I tend to try and do everything right the first time in order to avoid making a mistake I would have to apologize for later. I soon came to find out this mindset ended up being a barrier, preventing my growth in my DJS journey. 


There are many things I have had to learn in order to deepen my understanding of the role systematic racism plays in our society today. I am privileged to have had resources and opportunities made accessible to me in order to be able to educate myself on this subject. Unlearning was also a very important skill I had to practice in order to continue my DJS journey. Unlearning consisted of reflecting on past interactions I had, as well as actions I carried out and having to recognize the error in them. In order to learn from my mistakes, I first had to willingly acknowledge them, which was hard knowing what I know now. I have this guilty feeling that I should’ve known better about the choices I was making at the time. It was difficult to have to revisit certain situations because I would constantly feel ashamed of the inconsiderate actions I used to carry out with such ease. This got me thinking about how I may have affected the people around me as well. 


I thought about how my friends, classmates and family members might have felt when I partook in problematic behavior. It worried me they would have this negative and problematic image of me from years ago that I spent so much time and effort trying to reconstruct. Even though I have been working hard over the past few years to dismantle my past ignorant mindsets, that still didn’t feel like enough to me. I realized even though I had personally acknowledged my mistakes and was working towards fixing them, my feelings of guilt and shame would continue to sit with me until I acknowledged them out loud. This meant reaching out to people who were witnesses to my past behaviors that also could’ve been negatively affected by them. 


My intention was not to seek out validation through the acceptance of my apologies, nor to “showcase” my growth for praise either. I did it for those around me to feel validated, though it had been very long overdue. The severity of the occurrence or whether or not people had remembered it or had been affected by it is not what mattered, what mattered was that things were finally being addressed and action was being taken to resolve the potential harm I might have caused. I’m happy I was able to sit in my discomfort long enough to be able to take the lessons I have learned and apply them to work proactively towards the process of anti-racism.


“If we’re growing, we’re always going to be out of our comfort zone.” 
- John Maxwell

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