Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Regrets, I've Had A Few

Anyone who says, "I have no regrets" is quite frankly, lying.


Perhaps they are sociopathic and have no feelings at all.  Oh but that's rather harsh.  I know... let's just give everyone the benefit of the doubt and say anyone who says, "I have no regrets" is slightly self-delusional.


We've all done things we regret.  We hurt someone's feelings.  We said something that unintentionally embarrassed someone.  We lost our temper.  We stole a gumball from the corner store as a kid.  Something.  Doesn't need to be a big thing, although goodness knows many of us have some whoppers in our past.  We all have things in our past that we wish had turned out different.  That's regret.


The constructive thing to do is look at regrets as lessons.  Life lessons to be learned.  Look back at something that happened and say, "OK that was bad, but here's how I would handle that next time".  Learn.  Grow.


Of course, that's all well and good for someone without a mental illness.  "Normies," as the interesting folks over at Mixed Nuts call them.


For someone like, oh say....Me, it's much harder to translate a regret into a lesson.  I tend to dwell on things.  things that may have happened 20 years ago... or more.  As I have discussed before, I also sometimes "catastrophize" things.  Combine those two things and you've got a recipe for more darkness.  A fragment of a memory of something that happened in high school and has very likely been forgotten by all others concerned, can have a physical effect on me.  When one pops up, I can feel it hit me like a briskly swung pillow.  I usually openly and physically flinch when something like that enters my addled mind.  It's quite ridiculous, in fact.


I read someplace that learning to deal with past trauma (real or imagined) involves a very important step.  One has to learn to remember the event without re-living the event.  That's key.  I just don't know how to do it at all.  Been trying that one for years.  I still remember and re-live stupid things that happened ages ago.  It's like I am a skipping record that repeats the same part over again without getting to the end of the song.


In the end, I have to remember that regrets represent moments that something went wrong.  To not learn from these moments would be something to regret even further.


"Regrets, I've had a few, but then again, too few to mention"


1 comment:

  1. Beautiful!
    && So true!
    That's all I have to say
    :)

    Have a lovely weekend.

    ReplyDelete

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