There’s a lot said about living with no regrets.
Everything happens for a reason.
It made you who you are.
You did the best you could.
No regrets.
But what if you do regret it?
What if, given the chance, you would absolutely go back and do something differently?
Maybe you stayed too long. Left too soon. Trusted someone you shouldn’t have. Didn’t tell someone how you felt. Took the wrong job. Let an opportunity pass. Spent years worrying about things that never happened.
Or maybe your regret is harder to sit with.
Maybe you hurt someone.
Maybe you said something you wish you could take back. Behaved in a way you’re not proud of. Made a choice that affected somebody else. Perhaps you can see now, with painful clarity, exactly what you should have done differently.
We don’t have to turn every regret into “but I’m glad it happened because it made me who I am.”
Sometimes we’re not glad.
Sometimes we just wish it hadn’t happened.
Hindsight has an unfair advantage
It’s very easy to look back at ourselves and think:
How could I have done that?
Why didn’t I leave?
Why didn’t I see it?
Why didn’t I say something?
What was I thinking?
But the person looking back has something the person standing there at the time didn’t have.
Everything that happened afterwards.
You have more information now. Maybe more confidence. More experience. Different boundaries. A better understanding of yourself or other people.
Of course you can see things differently from here.
That doesn’t mean we excuse everything our past selves did. Sometimes we need to take responsibility.
But responsibility and lifelong punishment aren’t the same thing.
What about guilt?
Guilt isn’t always a bad thing.
Sometimes guilt has a job to do.
It tells us that something we did doesn’t sit comfortably with who we want to be. It can make us stop. Reflect. Apologise. Make amends. Change our behaviour.
If we’ve hurt somebody, “I was doing the best I could” shouldn’t become a way of avoiding responsibility.
We can say:
I did that. It hurt someone. I wish I hadn’t. I’m sorry. What do I need to do differently now?
But there comes a point when it’s worth asking:
Is this guilt still doing a job, or am I just using it to punish myself?
Because carrying guilt for another ten years doesn’t undo what happened.
It doesn’t make an apology more sincere.
It doesn’t heal the person you hurt.
And your continued suffering isn’t proof that you’re sorry.
Sometimes we can make amends. Sometimes we can’t. The person may no longer be in our lives. They may have died. Contacting them might not be appropriate. There are things in life we simply cannot go back and repair.
Sometimes the only amends available to us is to make sure we don’t do the same thing again.
The bags we carry
I often think we carry heavy bags around with us that we picked up years ago.
We’ve carried them for so long that we barely notice the weight anymore.
Regret. Guilt. Shame. The things we wish we’d done. The things we desperately wish we hadn’t.
And somehow we start believing that because we picked the bag up, we have to take it everywhere with us.
We don’t.
Putting it down doesn’t mean pretending it wasn’t heavy.
It doesn’t mean what happened didn’t matter.
It doesn’t mean excusing ourselves, rewriting history or deciding that everything happened for a reason.
It just means we don’t have to carry it everywhere we go.
And before we put it down, perhaps we need to look inside.
What did this teach me?
Maybe you learned to trust yourself.
Maybe you learned what your boundaries are.
Maybe you learned to speak sooner, leave sooner, listen more, apologise properly, choose differently.
Maybe you learned something about the person you don’t want to be.
Take that with you.
Take the lesson. Leave the punishment behind.
Because you’ve already given that decision part of your past.
How much of your future does it get to have too?
Before you go…
You might do it differently if you had the chance again.
Perhaps that’s the whole point.
You don’t get to make that choice again.
But there will be other choices.
And this time, you get to make them knowing what you know now.
You can’t go back and put the bag down five years ago.
But you can put it down here.