How can I give myself grace for the mistakes I have made and remain positive, rather than get depressed, angry, and anxious?

It's easier to focus on our mistakes rather than our accomplishmetns. Especially when we have depression, the bar for what qualifies as an accomplishment is almost impossibly high, and the bar for what qualifies as a dire mistake is very low. Being aware of how our depression skews these scales, trying to acknowledge what we did do or what did right vs what we didn't do, and trying to be kinder to ourselves when we're disappointed can help you with your positivity over time. Life is suffering, but it is also beautiful. You attempted to do the thing you made a mistake with - that attempt is amazing, even if it didn't work out! Go you! When we have depression, a lot of things we take for granted count as accomplishments because it is so much harder for us to pursue them - things like, even thinking about doing something, getting out of bed, putting on clothes, taking showers, walking around, looking out of a window, posting a question on 7cups, surviving to struggle for another day, these are all amazing things that we can celebrate in ourselves. Depression definitely wants to spit on these things and tell us they aren't valuable enough, and it wants us to focus on anything negative it can find, blowing mistakes and human errors way out of proportion and make us feel awful for existing. We cannot be perfect. We are human. We are beautifully chaotic. We can do this. We have to be patient with ourselves and try to reward ourselves for any little thing we can think of. When we catch ourselves thinking something like, "I should have done that better" - instead we can try thinking, "That was a skewed though. I guess I tried and that counts for something, even if it wasn't done as well as I would have liked." It's not about being positive vs being negative, it's about finding that realistic middle ground; often there is a duality to many things. Trying to reduce how much we judge ourselves by preventing comparisons, not telling ourselves 'I should' &c, and just allowing ourselves to recover at our own pace can help this process for some people. Another method some people use is trying to divert their thoughts to something mildly amusing that happened recently. There are many ways people deal with negative thoughts, and asking 'how' is a brilliant way to get started on that path. GREAT JOB! You're amazing!

We all make mistakes. It is part of being human. Being human means coming up against a wide variety of difficult experiences and learning from them and in this way becoming better human beings. We can cannot change the past, but we can learn from it and do better in the future. And here lies the answer to the question, it´s a matter of focus: instead of becoming depressed, angry and anxious about something we cannot change, focus on the future with our new understanding and experience and work on making that brighter.