"your mistakes do not define you"

This once never made any sense to me, what mistakes would lead someone to even fathom a quote like that? I made mathematical mistakes during an exam during my school years, falling for the "wrong" person, taking the wrong route whilst driving or even getting on the wrong train- they are all very little and minute mistakes that life throws at you during the long and winded journey through it. However, I sat and thought about the quote when I used to see it floating around the internet. I convinced myself that maybe not everybody makes big mistakes, mistakes big enough to expound and mold who people think you are. However, living through my teenage years, i realized that people make mistakes, not little ones but big ones- ones that could potentially change how you feel and think of yourself and how others do too. And it's only after reading this quote do I realize that maybe they actually don't. I've made far too many mistakes this past year... 8 months to be exact, and as much as I would like to think I regret them, there's no point in doing so because let's be honest here, everybody knows that the mistakes you make are lessons, they're the next wooden panel along the rickety wooden bridge to another chapter in your life. It may rock your insides quite traumatically, it may drive you mental when you over think it but again, the mistake doesn't define you, it's only a little bump in the road that you unfortunately had to live through. I need to keep reminding myself this as it seems I do a lot of thinking sometimes and not only that, i dive deep and deep and deeper into the smoky, dark and dusty hollows of ancient caves. I think too much that I drive myself to insanity sometimes, to a point where I feel like I can't get up anymore. How stupid of me, but as my teenage years come to a close, it's just another chapter in this massive novel that I need to live through. There's really no point in dwelling as I still have a very long way to go, I think so anyway. I, nor anybody else, knows when I'll turn the page and it'll be blank and my life will be nothing but a puff of air, a droplet of information in this very vast, colorful and noisy scientific universe.
Mistakes, hah.