Regrets, I've Had a Few

and the things I do and think, perhaps, I shouldn't have.

Want something done you must do it, do it.
A never to pain and you'll always rue it.
It comes back, it chokes, it corrodes, eschew it!

The world of things undone has far more matter
than this one, its vaults and vats far fatter,
its deep-groyned orange sands too dense to scatter.

The castles you can build, and drinks to drink,
pack that space to which you have no link.
You hesitated at the cloudy brink.

Tables are laid there, not with food that kills.
The food that kills already steams and swills
in pretty clingfilm from your bursting tills.

It's ordinary, it's great, we can't not take it.
How can we think of heaven, and then make it?
This is our thirst, not that, it's easy, slake it.

And so they sit back filled with nothing, staring
at shadows, fit for a yawn, abruptly glaring
if you say bearing nothing is not worth bearing.

Keep the door shut, it's a dark wind out there!
I can hear dragons scratching in their lair!
- Get out, you fools, and breathe the dragon's air.

Edwin Morgan

The only things I DO regret are putting my foot in my mouth, saying dumb shit within earshot of the wrong ears, and making someone feel crappy.

Oh and four others. Are you interested? If you are, I'll post them. It'll help me get them off my chest. But only if you're interested.

I am rewriting "my way" with "you fanny memories, I've had a few" and other appropriate lyrics.

Most of the things I regret not doing, I wasn't allowed or invited to do anyway?

What is this supposed to mean?

perhaps I will regret playing you it, someday.

No shame, I guess.

But also, no regrets.

What is a (minor) infidelity? I am very unimpressed by your laxity, if that is the word, on this matter. If you are talking about sexual infidelity, I'm afraid I don't think it is minor.

Perhaps you mean it was with minors?

Or, it's a spelling mistake - it was that time you went down the pit in Yorkshire and came up dirty?

What is this supposed to mean?

I think it means that nobody really likes me.

As my brother used to be fond of saying, before he went mad, "What might have been does not exist."

-Robert Frost

I regret not carrying an umbrella this morning, though.

It does by turns annoy and amuse me when 90% of famous people interviewed answer the question '"Any regrets?" or "Would you do anything differently?" in the negative, to the extent that I immediately warm to anyone who says "God yes - millions of them."

I never really believe people when they say they have no regrets. It just seems too alien an idea to me, I guess. I usually just think they mean "Well, I think it's healthier not to allow oneself to be plagued by regret" rather than "I have no regrets at all". Or that they're just parroting it as something that's the cool thing to say, but that's probably not fair of me.

I'm not saying that I don't do it, I'm just saying that it is destructive.

This is the bit I struggle with. It's a kind of double-think that I can't get my head around. It's something to do with time. It's not good that you did it at all, but it's good that you did it now. I know what you and other people are getting at when you say that, but I struggle to get a mental hold on it.

I guess I just hate uncertainty. I'd rather open the box and find Shroedinger's Cat dead, than live with that nebulous fear/worry of uncertainty.

But as I say, most of my regret is about things I've not done, not things I have, so this doesn't really apply anyway.

Anyway, enough about me. I've even bored myself.

oh and not finding out the guy's name in the green doc martens that i bought a stone roses ticket off of at the burbank music plus in 1990. so if that was you....

So I can say that I regret staying with my first long-term gf for as long as I did, but then again things afterwards would have been very different, and I'm not sure I'd have wanted them to be.

The other thing about hindsight and perspective is that I could be 100% in agreement with in you just a couple of months down the line.

The thing I worry about most is getting to the age of 40 and suddenly wondering why I didn't go out and travel the world in my youth and have adventures rather than sitting at a desk on ILX all day and going to the pub four nights a week. That's also a perspective thing. Maybe I should become the apprentice Gareth after all.

(x-post)

Well, as I said upthread, I am a very cautious person, probably too cautious and so am far, far more likely to regret *not* having done things than to regret having done things. This is definitely inherited one way or another - both my parents were v cautious ppl. So it's in my genes or I was taught, or both! But I'm trying my best to try and override this now because I am sure that I could benefit form doing so in all sorts of ways. Like for example a few moments ago I went to talk to CMG ;)

Used to be the latter, but these days I'm hell-bent on aiming for the former. Better to regret doing something than regret missing the chance.

I'm tryna figure out how to actually handle regret, since I find that I beat myself up over things I did 4 years ago, as I see them directly contributing to massive anxieties I have now...

In particular, I curse myself for some bad job-related choices I made in 2002, since I now face problems in the same area, and feel that all these could have avoided had I not made those mistakes back then. The problem is not that I actually made those mistakes, or didn't do what I should have done, but that I now let my mind obsess over these mistakes, and cause self-damage from that.

Actually, I feel this is one of the reasons why I'm so terrified of making mistakes, since I'm far more likely to heap ginormous amounts of criticism on my own head later for it.

I would suggest (as cheesy as it sounds) some positive self-talk that you repeat to yourself daily, and when this crushing anxieties come up. Keep repeating it until you believe it. Something about how regret over the past does nothing but waste your present, you made the best choices with the information you had at the time, etc.

regret is such a useless feeling!

I just think that my life's so unstable right now(due to job/financial inadequacies) that my desperately acute desire to straighten everything out has put me into some self-hypercritical/failure analysis mode, and that I feel like I'm so close to fixing everything that there's some of odd irrational belief that I can bridge this final gap thru sheer reflective effort alone.

Like all that's required is that I run some mental engine at 6000 rpm and everything will be fine.

This is a sabotage. be careful.

Knowing how I made a mistake somehow allows me to chastize myself for making it; like I continually berate myself and ask how I could be so stupid to actually choose that.

I think that some of the heavy critical impulse will go away once I get everything straightened out, but until I do, I'll continually look for reasons why, be those reasons completely irrational and bullshit or not. I'm unable to sufficiently answer the question of "what do I now to fix this," so I start to ask "how did I get here in the first place, and why am I still here," which is where the self-criticism comes in.

If you spend the rest of the game worrying about how you went behind, you'll never get your shit together to pull off that glorious last minute victory.

OTM.

For me, I try to make things concrete and then prioritize by issues that I have the most control over. Then, for me, it's easier to take action because there seems to be a plan.

You're not an idiot. If you just perservere--which, much of the time, simply means showing up for work--you are a smart enough to find a way to prosper.

well that's the trick, innit? it's all too easy to build up that aspect, and to simplify things so that I can just use that a club to self-castigate, as it were; "If only i hadn't done THIS, and I'm stupid for not doing THAT." Looking behind you, the road not taken always leads to Paradise, since it's far more seductive to believe in this simple dichotomy than an acknowledgement that both this way and that way lead thru shit, only of two different flavors.

If you just perservere--which, much of the time, simply means showing up for work--you are a smart enough to find a way to prosper.

this is true, but part of the criticisms is a matter of expectations.

Key Example: I moved out to Portland expecting that I'd have a rough go at it for a bit, but that I'd be able to get something under control in not too long a piece and be fine. The fact that things are still as shakey as they are after 18 months, and that anything I've done so far as disintegrated(taking a newer job last year which wound up sucking and laying me off, getting a writing gig for a website that had massive start-up funding problems, etc) is really distressing and angering.

So part ofthe angst isn't that things are shit, but that they are still shit.

It's an irrational thought process; i'm able to beat myself up for not earlier knowing info I learned thru mistakes before I actually made them. I frame it by thinking this knowledge is just so simple and so clear, I should have obviously known it before, shouldn't I?

Suffice it to say, growing up the product of two critical public school teachers(one more hypercritical than the other) kinda built in a whole "overzealous feedback loop" thing.