Regrets, I've had a few

Leaving the past IN THE PAST

The other day I was walking my usual route to where I volunteer, passing over some black ice spots on the sidewalks and listening to the slow groan of the city buses navigating various turns. As I walked, I did the one thing I had successfully avoided doing since I came home-Thought a “what if” about the past. What if I had functioned better, as a non-dysfunctional person? Where would I be today-DC, NYC, back in North Carolina where I thought I would return? Overseas? Would my Dad still have Parkinson's? Would I have a place of my own by now? A career in International Development? The pondering luckily didn't last long as I was focused on my day ahead. In the reality of my present, I have no time to reminisce or regret. I will never work in International Development, my former flame “R” long moved on while I was locked up, and I no longer desire to try and move back to North Carolina let alone work in DC or NYC. Nostalgia doesn't move anything forward, let alone me.

If there's one thing I've seen time and time again in people in recovery it's a huge weight of regrets that they carry with them through their attempt to maintain their sobriety and recovery path. Missed birthdays, divorces, estranged children now grown, lost jobs, friends who fatally OD'd while they survived..So much trauma, loss, and grief. It's when someone mentions they are taking it “one day at a time” that I know they are moving out of regret finally. There's an important thing about Regret we may forget-Regret is a natural part of grief, neither good nor bad. It's what you do with regrets that matters. You can regret many things, but it's the carrying them that does the real damage. At some point, we have to put down the burden of things done and “left undone”, of the shoulda, woulda, and coulda. We mourn, we grieve, we feel the anger at how our past actions tore apart our best plans, our aspirations, our elaborate dreams for how the world was supposed to actually be.

Fulton Oursler, the playwright and journalist, says the following about Regret:

We crucify ourselves between two thieves: regret for yesterday and fear of tomorrow.

Do we fear that our healing is in constant jeopardy? That if we let go of regret we are minimizing our responsibility? Maybe we think that the guilt olympics will crown us victor if we beat ourselves up enough. I don't know fully why it is that we think we are able to fix the past by carrying it into the future, but we do this over and over again. Yes, we f'd it up in the past. Yes, we damaged and destroyed and lost trust from others, but we are also gaining so many things we never had before- Courage, Resilience, Clarity, Hope. Recovery starts with recovering our sense of ourselves again, of realizing that under all the the refuse of our past we are who we always have been, inherently good people who forgot our true nature, our truest self. When we realize that it was there all along, we don't regret, we regain.