Regret?
I find it amazing that as we get older we can look back on our life with a clarity that doesn't seem possible in the present. We try not to regret things, but we do. We try not to take life for granted, but we do. We tell ourselves we are not afraid of change, but we are. These are not things that are neccesarily bad, but it is something we all deal with on some level. None of us are perfect, and we shouldn’t be.
There is no manual for how to live life or how to make the changes we need. But we keep trying, hoping it is isnt too late. I remember someone saying to me when I was a child that if the moment you stop growing is the moment you begin to die. I have no idea who said this to me, but I think they are right.
This year has been one of the oddest of my life, and the worst. Now, I want to make sure that is in perspective. IF this is the worst year I have ever had, my life could not have been a bad one. Just the loss of the job and the continuing struggle to find a new one, the breakup, and trying to deal with my family and being broke. I have never really tried to deal with so many things at once, which may be part of the problem. I have never been good at knowing what my limitations are.
But it has been 5 months since the breakup with Jenn, and I stiill haven’t recovered from it. Yes, the irony is I am the one the broke things off. Which is something I am very good at. I am almost 40 years old and I am still trying to figure my life out. It sucks that I realized what I was doing after I had already pushed Jenn away from me. I did make an attempt to get her back, but by then she had saw things in us that gave her pause as well. Not to mentioned I had hurt her and anyone can say they are willing to change. How many people actually do? I am not sure I would believe me either. I don’t blame her for trying to move on with her life and lord knows I want her to be happy. I miss her like crazy and am hoping at some point I can stop being an emotional trainwreck of a person. I have no problem with being an emotional person, but the amount of time I spend crying at this point is just getting pathetic.
I have been in love three times and all three times I pushed that person away and eventually broke things off. Raye was my first true love, but I was so young and inexpereinced. Or at least that is the excuse I always used when I talked about why we broke up. I cannot even do that anymore, since I have done the same thing twice since then. Yeah, that may have been part of it, but I know how that the main reason I did it was due to fear. Seeing picutres of us together today brought a lot of that back. Things I have not thought about in a long time. Seeing how beautiful she was and remembering how happy we were once. That comes back to regret. Again, everyone says you should not regret things, but in a long life, how is that possible? We make our choices and have to live with them, and I understand that. But you cannot help but wonder what could have been. She has an amazingly talented son and today I had so many memories of us take over everything. It was a very surreal thing to say the least. It has been like 12 years or so since that breakup and only recently have we even started talking again. Seeing updates about her son is always something that hits me in ways I don’t completely understand. But I know now, and knew then that she would be a great mother…it seems like she is.
Wendy was the same story in some ways. Loved the hell out of her, but was so damn angry at the world and scared to really commit to someone. She also had a wonderful little boy and I have to say one of the few solaces in my life at that point was how he made me feel. Being a father is something I knew how to be for some reason. I didn’t really get anything else right as I shut her out and we just stopped talking about anything at all. Eventually I broke that off and to this day I know of all the people I have hurt in my life, I hurt her the most…for how I broke up with her. That is something I will never completely forgive myself for. She is also the last person I have seen in Oklahoma as I have not went back in the almost 8 years I have lived in New York City. I never realized until we talked about all of this in the last year or so how hard it was for her to drive me to the airport. After talking to her for a bit I realized how much it actually hurt me to never have dealt with any of this. Feeling guilty about it and ignoring it as much as I could. Hell, I moved to NYC partly to get away from having to deal with that. Yet, it is funny, but the need for forgiveness is something that we all still need. She forgave me, and we are actually pretty good friends at this point. I never thought that would have been possible, but life surprises you sometimes.
I have not always been the best person. I have hurt people in order to protect myself. I am not proud of this and I have been dealing with the guilt of this most of my adult life. I have been to therapy on a few different occasions to deal with this, and for the first time I think I understand it a bit now. Everything goes back to my famliy, which is why I am going to get that relationship fixed. I started it, but it is not where I want it to be yet. But you have to start, right?
So where am I going this this? I have no idea, I just started typing and this is what came out of it. As bad as this year has been at times, it has been a year of the past. Of having people come back in my life that I have not spoken to in anywhere from a couple of years up to over ten. I am still trying to become a better person and to find the answers to my past. Sometimes you have to understand your past in order to face your future. I have seen so many times recently where I realize how short life can be. How quickly things can be taken from us. I have even had my own scared with a stroke I had back in 2004. Still, I don’t want to the person I am now. Good or bad, I want to be better. I deserve happiness as much as anyone else and it is time I stopped myself from achieving it.