My mother has taught me some very important lessons in life, two of which are: to never write down something you don’t want anyone else to read, and to have no regrets.
I’ve sometimes failed with the first one: writing an email that I shouldn’t have written. Posting something somewhere that I didn’t want anyone to see and inevitably they saw it. But I have spent much of my life living as though I had no regrets. And I thought for a long time I knew what that meant.
When I was in high school, my friends and I, who were, looking back on it now, the freaks in my school, sat under the tree in the lobby by the huge front windows that stretched from the first floor to the third. Other people sat there too, around us, the punks, or whatever. We were the kids in my school who I believed made a conscious effort to fill our lives to the brim with whatever we deemed important at the time and to live with no regrets. A boy who sat with us near the tree (which everyone joked was what my school bought instead of equipment for a football team) had a tattoo that I remember seeing, and thinking I understood. It said, “One Life, One Chance.” I thought it was a reminder for him to have no regrets and had always admired him for it. I suppose it still could be the reason why he had it. But thinking back, I find it more and more terrifying to have such a thing inked into your skin. A constant reminder that this is it, that everything you do counts, there are no do-overs. What does that sort of mentality do for your ability to make decisions, I wondered. You decide to live to the fullest, make each day count, after high school you go to Nepal, India, Thailand. You decide you are living your life to the best of your ability. You come home, you hear about college from your friends, about the knowledge they’ve gained and paths they are on and people they love, and you know your experience was just as valuable, but how do you reconcile these feelings of loss you have? And that situation can work either way. Because as much as we want to be able to have everything and do everything and make sure we are using this one life as best we can, we can’t do it all. Do we regret this? Are these the sort of things we’re meant to regret? Or do we save regret for instances like that time we made out with that guy who was not our boyfriend. Or maybe we should regret the day we told our brother exactly what we thought of his wife. Or we should regret canceling that trip we had planned to take to Japan because we thought we’d better pay back our student loans instead. If we have one life and one chance, then we can’t allow ourselves the chance to regret any of our choices. Right?
I’ve always believed that was right, and have lived my life not letting myself have regrets. I have made many, many mistakes in my life, and have never allowed myself the chance to regret any of them. I made choices, I would live with them, I would stand behind them and suffer any consequences - whether they be good or bad. This worked for a long time. But I’ve realized lately that it’s also been doing something else: it’s been giving me an excuse to accept my mistakes as inevitable outcomes of my poor choices. I’m saying that having no regrets hasn’t allowed me to learn from my mistakes. I’m saying that I’ve been letting myself off the hook from taking responsibility for my choices. I’m saying that having no regrets isn’t working for me anymore. Because I’m noticing I have been continually making the same bad decisions over and over again.
So I’ve come to the conclusion that having regrets is okay. It doesn’t mean I’m not living my life - that could only happen if fear of having regrets paralyzed me from making any sort of choice in my life. My regrets happen because I made a choice, realized it was the wrong one, and I allowed myself to accept it as a regret; to let myself believe that if given the choice again, I would choose differently. And that’s okay. I should be allowed to regret, to lament, to feel sadness over missed opportunities, over wasting my time with the wrong people, over hurting someone by saying something I didn’t mean, over not saying something when I should have, over making the wrong choice. I don’t need to accept it blindly and push forward, never looking back, reassuring myself, “I have no regrets.”
I know I only have one life, and one chance, but what’s the point of living it if I’m not learning and improving and striving towards something better?
