We All Have Regrets

We all have regrets. We’re only human. We make mistakes, we say things we wish we hadn’t, and we make choices that, in hindsight, we might have made differently. And then there are those embarrassing moments we would happily erase from existence if we could.

But something I’ve come to learn over time, through therapy, through my own healing from trauma, and through living with cPTSD, is that I have to stop looking at those moments as things that went wrong.

They happened.

And because they happened, they became part of the road that brought me here.

That Doesn’t Mean It Was Supposed to Happen

That doesn’t mean everything that happened to me was good. It doesn’t mean the hurt was necessary or that trauma was somehow meant to happen. I would never romanticize that.

But I have learned that I can’t keep living in the alternate versions of my life, the ones where I said something different, made a different choice, took a different road, or somehow knew then what I know now.

We often torture ourselves with the question, “What if I had done things differently?”

But the truth is, we didn’t.

We Did the Best We Could With What We Had

We did what we did with the knowledge, awareness, coping skills, and understanding we had at the time.

Occasionally we made the best decision we could. Occasionally we made a terrible one. Sometimes we hurt people. Sometimes people hurt us.

And sometimes, those mistakes and painful moments changed us in ways we couldn’t have imagined at the time.

That doesn’t excuse the mistakes. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take responsibility for them. It simply means we can acknowledge them without spending the rest of our lives punishing ourselves for making them.

Stop Living in the Alternate Versions of Your Life

I’ve come to believe that if something was meant to go another way, it would have.

Not because I believe there is some predetermined script for our lives, but because once a moment has happened, that is the path we have. There is no alternate version of it waiting somewhere for us to step into.

We can learn from what happened, take responsibility for our part in it, make amends where we can, and allow ourselves to grow beyond it.

But we cannot go back.

And truthfully, maybe we’re not supposed to.

Making Peace With the Life We Actually Lived

So maybe healing isn’t about wishing we had lived differently.

Maybe it’s about finally making peace with the life we actually lived.

The mistakes. The regrets. The embarrassing moments. The heartbreak. The things we got wrong. Everything we survived.

All of it brought us here.

And maybe the goal isn’t to erase the past.

Perhaps it’s to stop letting the past convince us that we don’t deserve the future.

Because we do.

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash