Regrets

People say that if you did everything you could, gave it all you had and if there wasn’t anything you could’ve done more than you should not have any regrets. I feel we all have the wrong mentality when it comes to having and dealing with regrets. I used to believe the notion that if you did not compromise on effort and your heart was in the right place you shouldn’t have or feel any regrets. But that feeling ever sustained in me, not because I didn’t try hard enough but even having that on my side, I would still have regrets lingering.

Point is we shouldn’t completely deny ourselves of our regrets, we definitely have to learn to let them go for sure, but in my opinion we are not even acknowledging them and by not doing that we will never address it properly. I don’t believe that people can have no regrets because nobody is perfect. Because ultimately regrets are not about how hard you did or didn’t work, it’s about what you did and what you could have done differently, and that’s totally fine. To have regrets is not to have cancer, to have regrets can be positive too if we acknowledge, learn and move on from them, we won’t be able to if we just pretend it’s not even there in the first place.

If we don’t have any regrets, than that means we didn’t learn anything from our mistakes. People who believe that they have no regrets are either in denial, can’t accept failure, are immune to taking responsibilities or have not or don’t want to learn anything from their mistakes.

Living with regrets is like living with scars, scars may seem permanent on our bodies or on our emotions, but as long as we don’t let it hold us back from improving our lives or our health we won’t be living under or in fear of them and I feel the only way to do that is to learn from them. Some of our regrets or scars may even define our character and our lives in beautiful, positive and unexpected ways. It’s very hard to let go, move on and find closure, but in this process of acknowledging and confronting our regrets we will always learn things about ourselves that can really impact our lives in very profound and interesting ways.