Forget Regrets

Submitted by Hillary on Fri, 07/23/2010 - 12:30

Photo | CC Licensed through Flickr

Everyone has regrets. Whether a person regrets being in a certain situation, saying something that they maybe shouldn’t have, or doing something they later thought was wrong, regrets are a part of our lives and we have to learn to live with them. However, sometimes regrets can take up too much of our time and instead of living in the here and now, we live in the past, in the what could have, or should have been.
 
There’s a famous line in two of the songs from the Broadway play and movie Rent that reads “forget regret, or life is yours to miss.” These eight simple words should be our mantra when we’re thinking too much about something that happened in the past. Regret is pointless and worthless and definitely has the ability to interfere with our lives if we let it.
 
I am the former queen of regrets. Before I came to Chicago I used to overthink everything. I would spend countless time worrying about what I said to a certain someone or what I did in an awkward situation and overthink everything to the point of mental exhaustion. This was a recurring nightmare that I thought definitely had the potential of becoming worse during my internship in Chicago, considering it was my first “real job” and I could be overthinking every situation and conversation I had, but surprisingly the regrets and overthinking have decreased dramatically.
 
Sometime over the course of my internship, I have had my own personal epiphany and have finally realized that worrying about my problems does not solve them whatsoever, in fact it just makes everything worse and more stressful. I've realized why should I  spend hours agonizing over something I can’t change? It’s just wasted time, time I could spend doing something I like, or something that makes me happy.
 
I think one of the reasons I’ve stopped overthinking and regretting things is the conversation I had with my grandmother a few months back. She gave me some great advice and said something along the lines of “you have to tell yourself what you did was the best you could do at that time. If you thought you were supposed to do it differently, you would have, but at that moment, that was what you felt you needed to do.” And that piece of advice can be applied to most regretful situations. At that time, you didn’t think it was something you would regret, or else you probably wouldn’t have done it, so in short, don’t waste time worrying about something you can’t fix.
 
Even though I over-think significantly less, I’ll still have regrets, as will everyone, but as long as I accept them and learn from possible mistakes, I can learn to live with and control my regrets, instead of having my regrets control my life. Everything is essentially a learning experience, the good, the bad and the ugly.
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Comments

For me, it's hard to not

Submitted by Chloe on Fri, 07/23/2010 - 15:15.

For me, it's hard to not regret if there is guilt involved. For example, if what I did might have hurt someone else close to me, I still keep on worry over it because I feel so bad about what I did. In such cases, regretting shows you that at least you have a conscience. But I agree that you shouldn't let regrets take over your life. So most of the time when I am on the verge of "regret attack," I just tell myself such and such thing was meant to happen. In other words, I convince myself that it was the course of fate or my life's path and then I try to keep a positive outlook on my future.