Living with Regret

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about the decisions I’ve made throughout my young adult life. They range from my college major to past relationships to my move to NYC. Upon looking back, it’s so easy to re-think my choices, and that flighty temptress known as regret sets in.

Sometimes I feel completely lost in regret, and it’s hard to move forward.

-I wonder if I had said this instead of that would that interview have ended differently?

-If I were more fun and outgoing and less quiet, would this person have chosen to date me?

-If I had chosen a different college major and ended up working in a completely different industry, would I be more content now?

When I’m caught up in these kinds of thoughts, I do wish I could go back and do things differently. But this desire to change the past is what makes regret a slippery slope. For me, it triggers intense sadness really quickly. 

After living with regret for several weeks, I sought out this podcast from Kara Loewentheil and realized that I only wanted a do-over because my thoughts were convincing me that my life would be better in the present if I had made different choices in the past. Understanding this, while huge and important, didn’t totally eclipse my regretful thoughts, and I continued to feel stuck.

My rationale for continuing to re-think my thoughts was that I wanted to gain understanding as to why things happened the way they did. I have spent a lot of time, for example, thinking back on relationships. I want to know why that relationship failed. I need to know to know why it failed in order to feel more peace, to move on. But, it dawned on me that no matter how much contemplation I do, I will never understand why or what really happened.

Finally, the magic happened after realizing that regret was just another form of anxiety. I was dwelling on the past because I felt anxious about the future. It was a way of me saying here are examples of ways I messed up in the past, so that I wouldn’t make similar mistakes in the future. It wasn’t about wanting a re-do, but more about how I was coping with the fear of not knowing what could be. 

The moment I realized this tie to anxiety, I started to make changes. When regret began to sit in, I approached it to how I deal with anxiety: I breathed, I found the anxiety in my body and relaxed those parts; then I talked back to my nervous thoughts. 

I was able to move really and truly forward and not be stuck in the what could have been. I was able to live in the present, carrying what I had learned in the past, so that it was helping me make my choices in a more balanced way. It felt healthy… and like I was properly adulting.

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