On Regret
My favourite urban legend is the story of the one time I successfully got over something and moved on with my life. It was December 2020, and after a truly awful year of covid lockdowns and uncertainty, the thing I was most heartbroken by was the fact that a dear friend wanted absolutely nothing to do with me. We had had sporadic contact that year, always initiated by me, until one day in early December our friendship ended for good. The very next day, Taylor Swift released her album evermore. I listened to it on repeat every day for three months, and I let myself feel the agony of losing this person. I listened to the ironically titled “Happiness” and mourned the good parts of our friendship, dwelled on the line “no one teaches you what to do when a good man hurts you, and you know you hurt him too” until it was etched into my brain. Songs like “Tolerate It” brought up more complicated feelings, reminded me that it didn’t matter how much I cared for someone if it only went one way. I learned to sit in my discomfort until one day it didn’t hurt anymore.
It makes a great story, right? Someone broke my heart, then my favourite singer released an album the very next day that helped me process my pain and purge the poison from the wound. You have to feel it to heal it, etc, etc. It makes a great story, but it’s not quite true.
I genuinely believed I was “over it” at the time, and I am in the most technical sense of the word. It’s been years, I’ve moved on with my life, I’m not actively torturing myself with a puzzle I can’t solve anymore. The pain dulled, became an infrequent but recurring toothache that I could worry at from time to time.
Last week, Maude Latour—another one of my favourite singers—released a song called “Comedown” about the death of her first love/old friend. I first listened to the song in the early hours of the morning on the day it was released, and fell back asleep with it on repeat. That night, I dreamt of my old friend. And maybe it’s just because it was the first time I’d heard their voice in over 4 years, but the dream shook something loose in my mind and triggered the biggest existential crisis I’ve had in a while.
Until a couple of weeks ago, I thought I had no regrets in my life. There are plenty of things I’ve done that I’m not proud of, but I knew that if any small thing had been different, I wouldn’t be where I am now. My life has undergone a vast amount of upheaval within the past month. I got rejected from all the PhD funding schemes I applied to, and after spending two weeks trying to reckon with the fact that my entire plan for my life had failed…I got an email informing me I had won a scholarship worth 50% of PhD funding. I got everything I wanted, albeit in the most financially finicky way possible. In September I will move to London with my boyfriend, and leave behind the city where I have spent all of my adult life. I finally get a fresh start, after so many years of stagnation.
I have been desperate to leave Glasgow for so long, but now that it’s happening, I have some Big Feelings. I can’t go anywhere in Glasgow without almost 8 years’ worth of memories, ghosts from my past layered on top of each other like mist. The most interesting years of my life have long since passed, but their holograms are alive and well in the Glasgow of my mind. My closest friends all moved away years ago, so I didn’t think I’d have much to miss. Those friendships live on in long voice messages and occasional visits; they’re not tied to Glasgow anymore. But I hadn’t considered the friendships that ended, the people who only exist to me in memories, tied completely to place and time. I’ve had my fair share of failed friendships, and I got over them so long ago that I can’t remember the good parts. Yet the one lost friendship that I thought I had fully recovered from continues to haunt the narrative. I like to think I don’t have “what if”s, yet I wonder if we would have eventually become friends again if the pandemic hadn’t happened.
And that’s the line of thought that really fucked me up. Because it’s fine to still hurt from time to time over a friendship that ended years ago. You don’t just switch off loving someone because they stop caring about you. You can fold away your affection, let it lie dormant in a quiet corner of your mind, but you’re not obligated to kill it. It sucks, but it’s life. I’ve made peace with it. However, the idea that my life could have gone in a tangibly different direction if it wasn’t for the pandemic… That is something I have never let myself dwell on before. I knew it stunted my growth; I knew it kept me in Glasgow when I wanted to leave. I knew that I watched the life I had carefully built for myself fade away as my friends all moved abroad and my community disintegrated. I knew that I lost years of my 20s and that my social skills regressed and I haven’t mentally recovered from it. What I had not done was let myself imagine where I would be right now if the world hadn’t stopped in March 2020. And fuck, it hurts to picture it.
I would most likely have chosen a different career path, fallen in love with different people, travelled to so many countries. I would have been brave and bold and ambitious. I would have made more friends, lived an active life, been fit and healthy. I would be further along in my career, further along in my life.
There are good things in the life I do have. I have an amazing boyfriend, and I’m writing a novel I’m proud of, and in three months I’ll be starting a PhD in a subject I’m passionate about. Yet if you laid out the details of the life I have versus the life I could have had, without the emotional attachments and the specifics of other people involved, I wouldn’t have chosen the life I have now. Yet I have chosen it, through my actions, every single day. I didn’t think I was a person who has regrets, yet I look back on my post-2020 life and I am crushed beneath the weight of “what if?”. I have been so passive. I spent years waiting for my life to start again, and now that it’s finally about to, I am overcome with grief at all the years I wasted. I have built a life of inertia, and I don’t know how to break free from it now. I don’t know how to magically transform into the person I need to be in September. I don’t know how to regain my social confidence, or my organisational skills. I don’t know how to lose enough weight to feel comfortable in my body. When I look in the mirror I see a physical manifestation of years of passivity. Now that all my regrets are spilling out, I wonder if that, too, is past the point of no return.
I fought for my future – I wouldn’t be doing this PhD if I hadn’t. But you need to fight for your present, too, and I failed myself on that count. There is so much about my life as it is now that I wouldn’t have chosen, but the alternative is a fantasy. I have no way of knowing how a pandemic-free life would have turned out, but I imagine I would have been held back by the same character flaws that plague me now. And in spite of those flaws, there is so much that I know about myself now that I might not have discovered in the idyllic alternative. If there’s one thing I have learnt, it’s that having the language to describe who you are and how your mind works is vital for both self-worth and interpersonal relationships. I imagine the road not taken – perhaps I would be successful in my career, perhaps I would have friendships that are no longer in my current life. And one day I would do or say something wrong, and I wouldn’t be able to explain why I am the way that I am. And I know that it’s true, because that was the story of my life in those years I look back on through rose-coloured glasses. Whether it was friendships failing, or people taking advantage of me, there is so much crap I could have avoided if I knew myself like I do now. It’s easy to lionise a version of myself I’ve outgrown, because she lived a much fuller life than I do now. But as I practically screamed to myself in my diary yesterday “there is nothing my 19-year-old self knows that I don’t!”
Maybe I’m living my life by Taylor Swift lyrics again and “looking backwards might be the only way to move forward”, maybe there’s a reason I keep looking to the past. But I doubt there is wisdom buried there. I don’t want to revert to the person I was in my early 20s. I don’t regret growing up, I just wish I’d done it better. So I reconfigure the jigsaw pieces of my self-image. I am a person who has regrets, and I can count them on one hand. I regret one lost friendship, I regret three years of inertia, and I regret my passivity. I used to be bold, I used to be an active participant in my life. What do my regrets say about me? That I could have done more? That I must do more now? I don’t know where to start.
I am in London this week, away from my ordinary life, in the land of my future one. And all I can think about is the past and my ghosts and how I should have been so much more than I am. It’s easier to see the cracks in the system when you’re outside of it. But in a few days, I’ll return to Glasgow and have to put my regrets into action. I can’t fix the first one, that ship has sailed across many seas by now. But I do have control over my inertia and passivity, and that’s terrifying. If I have control now, I always had control.
It is very fitting that I have reverted to my younger self’s favourite coping mechanism: screaming into the void by writing blogs about people who’ll never read them. I have changed so much and somehow not at all.
I have spent three years in this chasm between the life I had and the life I’m working towards. All I’ve wanted is to claw my way back up the cliff, to take action and move forward. Now that the one action I did take is about to pay off, I’m terrified. I’m getting exactly what I wanted, and I’m filled with panic. Not because I don’t think it’s meant for me, but because I don’t feel like me at all. My past self and the person I need to be in September have far more in common with each other than either of them does with who I am right now. I don’t know how to step back into my own shoes after so many years of floundering in the abyss. I don’t know how to be strong and capable and worthy of my ambition. Maybe it’s not a coincidence that I’m missing a friend who understood my ambitious side so well. Maybe I’m just aching for a ghost to talk some sense into me.