regrets, i have a few
but only one that keeps me awake at night
I have a lot of regrets, but most of them are of the half-hearted kind. I regret not listening to Up the Bracket by the Libertines sooner. I regret that patty melt I had for lunch yesterday. But I don’t think that’s what people are talking about when they ask if I have any regrets. They’re looking for life changing regrets. Things that haunt you, that leave you wrangling with the aftermath forever.
My second marriage (of three) was born of, and bolstered by, a years long mental breakdown. But big regrets are often composed of tinier regrets, where things. you wish you hadn’t done lead up to bigger things you wish you hadn’t done. I regret the entire relationship, but I also have misgivings about the things that led up to it; I wish I wasn’t on the computer that night I met him on AOL in 1998, I wish I didn’t go to Pennsylvania to meet him, I wish that months later I didn’t bring him back to New York with me after another visit. It’s a bundle of regrets that keep me up at night, but they all are tied up in a neat little package with a gift tag that says “I regret ever knowing you.”
The relationship was volatile, messy, toxic. I was merely an escape for him from a life he loathed in Pennsylvania. He was a divorce rebound for me, a defiant decision made in the deep recess of depression, a manic depression that manifested itself as rage and loss of rational thought. He was bad for me and I knew it from the start but I wasn’t thinking straight and flung myself into the relationship thinking I could fix him, I could fix us. But we remained broken and ill fitted for each other for the six years we managed to stay together.
I suffered his wrath, his jealousness, his dominance over me. My kids suffered from my ever deepening depression, anxiety, and general mental unwellness. I was not a good parent during this time and that’s another in a long line of regrets formed out of this relationship.
The thing about regrets is there is nothing you can do about them except agonize. Thinking about it night after night doesn’t fix anything. Regret does not offer a time machine that lets you go back and right the ship. So you just harp on it, obsess over it, waste so much time wishing that the things that happened never did.
I think about what my life would be like if I never met him. What direction would I have gone in? Would I have been a better mother? Would my anxiety be so bad without those six years of walking on eggshells? Where would I be now? Maybe I would have met someone else who was good for me. Instead, the last few months of my relationship with him ended in a downward spiral where I met husband number three, who changed my life for the better before utterly destroying it. I have walked a path of regrettable actions and they all have led me here, where I am alone and wishing for better things.
I think most everyone has regrets. But I don’t think that everyone has a regret so huge, so heavy, that it weighs on them night and day. I still feel the aftermath of my decades ago decisions; he fundamentally changed the way I think about myself, the way I see my place in the world and in other people’s lives. I’m not haunted by my regrets about going to see Lou Reed in 1984 (we walked out) or seeing the Evil Dead remake in the theater (we walked out); those are the simple kind of regrets we laugh about years later. But I am haunted by my relationship with my second husband. I dream about it, I think about it often, I despair about it sometimes. I wish so hard it never happened that I rarely mention it to anyone when talking about my marriages. There are people I work with, people I know cordially, who have no idea I had a marriage in between the one to my kids’ father and the one who abruptly left me last year. I want to wipe it from my mind, but I can’t do that because it carries such a heavy weight that I’ll never shed myself of it.
People I have talked to about it tell me to look at whatever good came out of the relationship and focus on that, but I can’t find anything. It didn’t help me grow in any way, it didn’t have any silver linings. There is nothing but regret and regret is perpetual time bomb that goes off at 3am almost every night.
What do you do about regret? How do you get to a place where you make peace with the past and not dwell on the what ifs? I’m still working on that, sixteen years after we finally, mercifully split up. I’ll probably be working on it forever.