600+ Months In: Stop Keeping Score and Start Giving Yourself Grace
I’m over 50.
I’ve lived over 600 months.
I have made over 50 mistakes in each of those 600 months that I have lived. Sometimes meaningful ones.
Promise me that today is the moment you’ve all decided to stop beating yourself up.
Everybody else sucks too.
You’re trying your best. Please learn how to give yourself grace. Stop putting people on a pedestal, including me.
We’ve all got shortcomings, too.
I wrote that as a blunt little truth bomb because I keep seeing the same pattern in good people. The kind who show up. The kind who try. The kind who carry their family, their work, their plans, their bills, their health, their regrets, and somehow still feel like they are behind.
If you are reading this and you are tired, I am not here to hype you up. I am here to give you permission to stop treating yourself like a criminal for being human.
The math is not the point, but it helps
Let’s play with the numbers for a second.
Over 600 months lived.
Over 50 mistakes a month.
That is a lot of mistakes.
If that makes you flinch, good. Not because you should feel worse, but because you should realize something important.
If you have lived any real life at all, you do not get to have a clean record.
You do not get to have a spotless past and also have experience. Those two things do not come together.
People who look “together” are not mistake-free. They are just better at hiding it, better at narrating it, or luckier about which parts got seen.
The real problem is the scoreboard
Most of us are not suffering because we made mistakes.
We are suffering because we keep replaying them like a courtroom highlight reel.
We keep a scoreboard in our head and we only count the points against us.
The time you snapped at someone you love
The job you stayed in too long
The money move you should have made earlier
The friend you lost
The habit you cannot seem to shake
The version of you that you thought you would be by now
Here is the tough love part.
You cannot build a future while you are constantly prosecuting your past.
At some point, self-awareness turns into self-harm if all you do with it is punish yourself.
Everybody else is struggling too
Yes, I said it the ugly way. Everybody else sucks too.
What I mean is this:
Everybody has blind spots. Everybody has ego. Everybody has scars. Everybody has days where they are not their best self.
Some people cope by acting superior. Some cope by staying busy. Some cope by numbing out. Some cope by posting a perfect version of their life like it is a product.
And a lot of us cope by doing something that feels productive but is actually poison.
We beat ourselves up.
We think if we are hard enough on ourselves, we will finally improve. Like shame is a fuel source. Like self-hate is discipline.
It is not.
Shame might create movement, but it rarely creates direction. It creates panic. It creates hiding. It creates burnout.
Grace creates consistency.
Stop putting people on pedestals, including me
This is a big one.
Pedestals are dangerous because they shrink you.
You see someone else and you think they have it figured out. You imagine their discipline is effortless, their confidence is permanent, their marriage is perfect, their finances are clean, their mind is quiet.
It is a fantasy.
Most of the “together” people you admire are just further along in one area, and just as messy in another.
Keep people human. Keep yourself human.
The next “mistake” might be the one that saves you
I will say something honest.
Going all-in on homesteading might be my next mistake.
It might be harder than I think. It might cost more than I planned. It might humble me fast. It might take longer than I want. I might get tired. I might mess things up. I might plant the wrong thing at the wrong time and learn the slow way. I might overbuild one area and neglect another.
And still, I am going to do it.
If my health permits.
Because sometimes the point is not to guarantee success. Sometimes the point is to choose a direction that feels like life.
Homesteading, for me, is not a Pinterest board. It is not an aesthetic. It is not a performance.
It is a decision to put my hands in real work. To grow something. To learn again. To trade noise for seasons. To build a place that makes sense to me.
If it becomes a “mistake,” fine.
At least it will be an honest one.
At least it will be a mistake made while moving forward, not while hiding.
And if health limits me, then I adapt. I scale it. I do it slower. I do it smaller. I ask for help. I stop pretending I have to do everything the hard way to prove something.
That is what grace looks like too.
What giving yourself grace looks like in real life
Grace is not pretending things did not happen.
Grace is you stop talking to yourself like you are disposable.
1) Replace the insult with a note
When you mess up, notice the first sentence your brain throws at you.
Usually it is something like: “I’m an idiot.”
Swap it with something true and useful:
“I missed that. Next time I will slow down.”
“I made a call with the info I had. Now I have more info.”
“That was fear. I can name it and move anyway.”
2) Do a clean review, not a shame spiral
A review asks: What happened? Why? What will I do differently?
A shame spiral asks: What is wrong with me?
3) Treat your life like a homestead, not a performance
On a homestead, you do not scream at the soil because last season had weeds.
You pull what you can. You amend. You plant again.
Some seasons are heavy rain. Some are drought. Some are pests. Some are surprisingly abundant.
You do not earn the right to keep planting only after a perfect harvest.
You plant because you are alive.
A promise for today
Today is the moment we stop beating ourselves up.
Today is the moment we stop keeping score like the goal is to be flawless.
Today is the moment we give ourselves grace and keep moving.
You are trying your best.
Now try doing it without hating yourself in the process.