Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Don't Regret Regret

Earlier today I posted a video on my Facebook wall about regret. The video was of Kathryn Schulz expressing that we should not regret regret. The video struck a chord in me and I wanted to elaborate on some of her main points.

I think it's particularly painful for us now in the West in the grips of what I sometimes think of as a Control-Z culture -- Control-Z like the computer command, undo. We're incredibly used to not having to face life's hard realities, in a certain sense. We think we can throw money at the problem or throw technology at the problem -- we can undo and unfriend and unfollow. And the problem is that there are certain things that happen in life that we desperately want to change and we cannot. Sometimes instead of Control-Z, we actually have zero control. And for those of us who are control freaks and perfectionists -- and I know where of I speak -- this is really hard,because we want to do everything ourselves and we want to do it right.

There are things that we all want to go back in time to change, but what would changing them actually do? Cause more regrets? I assure you that if life were not filled with mistakes, we would not be shaped into the people that we are today. Life was meant for living...so why do we try to create a cookie cutter form of what our lives should look like, when the mystery that makes life great awaits us?

So how are we supposed to live with regret? I want to suggest that there's three things that help us to make our peace with regret. And the first of these is to take some comfort in its universality. If you Google regret and tattoo, you will get 11.5 million hits. The FDA estimates that of all the Americans who have tattoos, 17 percent of us regret getting them. That is Johnny Depp and me and our seven million friends. And that's just regret about tattoos. We are all in this together.

You are not alone in your regret. You are also justified in your regret -- it's okay to have it. It is not okay to wallow in it. Life in spite of your regret, don't drown yourself because of it.

The second way that we can help make our peace with regret is to laugh at ourselves. Now in my case, this really wasn't a problem, because it's actually very easy to laugh at yourself when you're 29 years old and you want your mommy because you don't like your new tattoo. But it might seem like a kind of cruel or glib suggestion when it comes to these more profound regrets. I don't think that's the case though. All of us who've experienced regret that contains real pain and real grief understand that humor and even black humor plays a crucial role in helping us survive. It connects the poles of our lives back together, the positive and the negative, and it sends a little current of life back into us. The third way that I think we can help make our peace with regret is through the passage of time, which, as we know, heals all wounds.

Sometimes we have to throw up our hands and allow ourselves to hurt in order to be able to move on. The passage of time heals. Allowing yourself to heal is a process, one that can't be completed in advance. We all have to heal at our own pace on our own terms.

Let me reassure you about something, some of your own regrets are also not as ugly as you think they are. The most important lesson regret can teach us is also one of the most important lessons life teaches us. And ironically, I think it's probably the single most important thing I possibly could have tattooed onto my body -- partly as a writer, but also just as a human being. Here's the thing, if we have goals and dreams, and we want to do our best, and if we love people and we don't want to hurt them or lose them, we should feel pain when things go wrong. The point isn't to live without any regrets. The point is to not hate ourselves for having them. The lesson that I ultimately learned and that I want to leave you with today is this: We need to learn to love the flawed, imperfect things that we create and to forgive ourselves for creating them. Regret doesn't remind us that we did badly. It reminds us that we know we can do better.

This last paragraph is really something that has resonated with me today, something that I hope I don't soon forget. The mistakes I've made and the trouble I've caused is all a part of where I am today. The woman that I've become and the woman that I will be -- the person that others see me as: it's all a part of my past. There are things I wish I'd done differently, but there are also things I beat myself up over that weren't nearly as detrimental as I thought they were. My goal each day is to better myself. My next step in making myself "whole" is going to be to accept the life I've established regardless of past regrets. Things that I wish I could change don't matter, because where I am now is what's important.

I didn't do badly, but I can do better... (:

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