Regret dogs my daily existence. Despite my best attempts to dodge him, he is a unrelenting S.O.B. He is the uninvited guest who keeps showing up no matter how many times I kick him out of my life and home.
He brings with him constant reminders of the wrong choices I made and dangles them right in front of my eyes while taunting me maliciously. I ignore him, and he eventually retreats to sit in a corner but only to plot his next course of action against me.
I’m not alone in dealing with regret, this I know, but I’ve learned not to talk about my regrets much because most people simply say that I shouldn’t have them, that they’re in the past and best forgotten, and other such things that I already know but that I have an extremely hard time doing. However, I’ve become better equipped to handle Regret’s intrusions upon my life, but he is legion, as they say, so even when I manage to evict or vanquish him one day, he pops back up the next.
Clearly, I’m personifying something that has no human form — at least no separate human form. Regret lives inside each of us as a feeling — a feeling of deep sorrow for things beyond our control because they are in the past, and we can’t change the past.
Oh, if only we could. Better yet — a crystal ball that would show us, in advance, what will become of our decisions. But that would take the fun out of life, I know, and I imagine it would cripple many people who wouldn’t be willing to make life decisions if they truly knew how those decisions would turn out.
Regret, though, is the one thing I struggle the most with in my thoughts — the place where Regret lives and feeds. He’s a vicious little life sucker, that’s for sure, and I know this, so I fight against his onslaughts every day.
Over the past few years, I’ve weakened him, but he has a sneaky ability to know when my defenses are down — those times when I believe I’ve beaten him away from the door to my inner moods only to find him lurking in the shadows somewhere else. Fortunately, most days that’s all he does — lurk in the shadows — but sometimes he jumps out, tackles me, and pummels me with all he’s got.
Those are the days when sadness reigns in my heart, and that sadness is brought on by Regret and his ever-present pettiness and mean spiritedness.
Like most people, I’d say, I have a number of small regrets with small initial letter “r”s. Those regrets seldom appear, yet when they do, they only prick the surface of my defenses and barely leave a scratch. A regret from childhood when I was mean to a neighbor girl, another from junior high when I quit track, and quite a few from high school when I dated all the wrong boys and wasted far too much of my time on them.
There are two big ones, though, that rear their ugly heads over and over and even double team me at times with their taunts and their viciousness. They are the two I can’t avoid because they are so imbedded in my psyche.
They are my marriage — the fact that I legally bound myself to someone so wrong for me and so awful to me — and my 30-year career — the fact that I became a teacher at all and that I stayed with it for three decades.
Because I spent so much of my life, that precious thing that we only get one of, trapped in a bad marriage and doing a job I didn’t love is a hard pill to swallow. I beat myself up far too often for those two choices. Or I allow Regret to do the beating.
After all, they were MY choices. I made them. I married someone who was all wrong for me, and I went into education even though my heart and soul begged me to write.
Did I have my reasons? Of course I did, and those reasons seemed solid and wise when I made those choices, but that’s the problem with hindsight and its 20-20 vision. It sees the reality of those choices and can even pinpoint when those choices veered my life down roads I wouldn’t have gone down if I hadn’t married or gone into teaching.
The Regret surrounding those choices wouldn’t be so powerful if I hadn’t stayed on those wrong paths so long.
To weaken his power, I focus my energy on the good that came from those choices and create lists to show Regret that he may keep beating me down every day but that he’ll never defeat me. With time and continued repetition of these lists of the good things in my life, I am confident that I’ll eventually get one Regret with the capital R to shrink to a small regret or to vacate the premises forever even.
Wouldn’t that be nice?
That is the Regret about being a teacher because the list of all the benefits to my life that came from it is long and mighty.
The Regret about getting married, though, is here to stay I’m afraid. You may ask why that is when my two greatest blessings in life, my children, came from that marriage? Well, it’s simple. I didn’t have to marry that man to have those children — I only needed to have stayed in a relationship with him long enough to have them. I’ll never regret having them, that’s for sure — there’s not even a whiff of regret surrounding them.
There is, though, a gigantic Regret about marrying their dad because marriage is a legally binding contract that allows someone to take and take and keep on taking from you long after a marriage is over. There’s also the fact that I really let myself down by choosing to marry the person I did, and one part of me can’t forgive the rest of me for doing that to myself. After all, I should have my own back, right?
Teaching, though, gave me a lot, so even though I still have the Regret about sticking with it for 30 years, I can list a lot of things that came from those years for which I’m very happy.
all the great coworkers I met and gained as friends
all the great students I taught, some of whom are now friends
how I honed my Spanish over all those years of teaching
how I honed my public speaking ability over all those years of teaching and coaching speech as well as simply by having to speak day in and day out to my students
how I honed my writing through all the lesson plans and the cutting of plays for one-act and speech
how I honed my comedic timing because you better be a little bit funny if you hope to keep teenagers interested in what you’re teaching day in and day out
the travels abroad I took with students — two to Spain and two to Mexico
the tolerance I learned
the patience I learned
how I became more and more able and willing to go with the flow and adapt to all the things that get thrown at a teacher
the great amount of reading I did with the students and in preparation for lessons
the fresh air and exercise I got while outside with the marching band and the flag corps groups I coached
how my own knowledge of things grew immensely through the teaching of those subjects
etcetera
The Regret of the marriage is and will remain huge and a burden I will probably never shake. However, it will not break me.
The Regret of teaching, though, is shrinking noticeably each day because I’m able to combat it with all the good that came from it even though I’m still sad that I spent 30 years doing that instead of pursuing the one thing I truly love more strenuously.
Perhaps I can lowercase that R now — the regret I feel about teaching for so many years.
Writing is my solace. It helps me lessen my regrets, and it helps me strengthen my gratitude and reflect on the things that matter.
Others may tire of me writing about the one remaining Regret with the capital R, but perhaps if I write about it enough, the power of the pen will eventually cut that Regret down to size. I certainly hope so.
I will stop dwelling on it for now. Regret is a nasty little creature who lives in each of us. When he attacks me, I prefer to meet him head on and try to beat him into submission. If you suffer from your own overactive Regret monster, try what I do and write your own list of personal victories that came from the very thing you regret the most. Write the list, speak it out loud, and throw it in Regret’s ugly little face.
Onward and upward. That’s all any of us can do. I apologize for being a bit maudlin today — there are other reasons behind it which I might share in a week or two. Let’s just say that something awful happened today, and when I’m sad, Regret uses my sorrow to his advantage, but writing this has helped, as I knew it would. We can’t go back. No one can. And that is where Regret gets his power. Writing recharges me, and knowing that what I write sometimes makes a difference for someone else gives me my power and the energy I need to beat down Regret for another day. Onward and upward, my friends. Thanks for accompanying me on my writing journey.
Until next time.
Tammy Marshall
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