In times of struggle, we often find ourselves facing all of our demons, who more often than not decide to all surface at the same time.
Then the situation quickly escalates – your mind becomes clouded with judgment, as whispers of self-doubt create a whirlwind of disruptive thoughts in your head, and heart-pounding, you sit there staring ahead, dumbfounded and terrified.
Like you, I’ve known many different kinds of stress:
- The stress that comes with limitations: “Oh my god I’m running out of time studying, going to fail an exam tomorrow!”
- The stress that comes with powerlessness: “I’ve sent out a million resumes, how come nobody has emailed me back?”
- The stress that comes with uncertainty: “If I don’t get a job by the end of this month, where am I going to live?”
- The stress that comes with disappointment: “The date went okay I guess, but why do I feel so sad?”
- The stress that comes with sadness and loss: “I can’t breathe, and may drift away at any minute.”
But for me, the worst kind of stress is the stress associated with regret, perhaps because we want to think that to have regret means to admit to having some sense of agency, so that at some point in the history in the making, we could have done something to alter the realities we are experiencing today.
Maybe we convince ourselves that if we allow ourselves to admit to these regrets, we can place the blame on ourselves in order to make more sense of what had happened. To make the events of life less stochastic and absurd than they really are. To subject ourselves to an illusion of order and sensibility in which we find safety and security.
Maybe we could have tried harder.
Maybe we could have been more patient.
Maybe we could have listened more.
Maybe we could have chosen differently…or not at all.
The other day I was reflecting upon my fears of the future, and my fears related to my capacity to handle the future, when I suddenly came to a conclusion that all failure is, in fact, temporary. We fail, we learn from it, we get up, we try again. The less resilient see failure as a roadblock, as a wall. The more resilient see failure as a point of pivot, and with enough determination and apt strength, failure can help us bounce back to none less than the best versions of ourselves.
The only time failure becomes permanent is when you let regret take over and gain control of your actions, so you no longer act proactively but passively. When you start to equate “not doing a bad job” with “doing a good job”, when they can and should be fundamentally different things.
I know this because I’ve been there, and I’m sick of it. I’m sick of the shadow that regret casts over my life, dictating to me who I can and cannot be. I’m angry at myself for letting it control me for so long, for causing me so much inaction and anxiety. But it is the good kind of angry – the kind of angry that propels me forward to change for the better.
Don’t let regret become a shadow in your life, clouding your sense of self-worth. Start over, pivot, let go of the past and do something great tomorrow.
With much love,
V.
Valoress 