Oui, je regrette tout
Some people say they live life with no regrets. I assume these people are either liars or idiots.
No regrets? Really? There isn’t one thing you’ve done in your life that you wish you hadn’t done, or one thing you haven’t done that you wish you had? There’s not one action that you would like to go back and redo a little differently?
Come on, guys. Be serious.
But maybe I’m the freak, because sometimes it seems like every waking moment is consumed by regrets. Big regrets and small regrets, recent regrets and regrets from the distant past. For me, they are inescapable.
Maybe what people mean when they say they have “no regrets” is just that they’ve developed the knack of forgetting the things they regret.
What a marvellous skill that must be. I find it hard to imagine the peace of mind that would come from not periodically remembering a really bad joke I made in 1992 that must have made the other boys in my rugby team think I was a complete twat. I do not know whether any of the boys in my rugby team, who like me are now in their forties, ever think of that joke and say to themselves, “Gee that Ben was a fuckwit”. But every so often I feel the little stab to my brain that is the fear that maybe they do.
I wrote a story at primary school once. The last line of it was a fairly dumb and unoriginal one, because I was ten years old and fairly dumb and unoriginal things were all I was capable of. But my teacher commented on how the last line was a little bit lame - she didn’t use those words of course - and so I must now be haunted by that story for the rest of my life. I am condemned to forever remember that when I was ten, I wrote a less-than-perfect short story about talking fish, and I regret that with a deep, burning shame.
And the thing is, I really do not have the time or energy to deal with every tiny little misstep or socially awkward moment from my past, because I also have big regrets. Life-changing regrets. I often reflect on the fact that my life is in ruins because of the huge, momentous errors I’ve made that have fractured my future. I often reflect on the myriad opportunities I’ve missed in my life that have prevented me from getting anywhere near the life I wanted for myself at this stage.
With all that reflection going on, having to also regret not doing up the last button on my shorts before delivering a monologue from A Midsummer’s Night Dream in front of the whole class in Year Seven is exhausting.
But I can’t help it. Because my regrets are me, and I am my regrets. There may be many constituent parts to the thing we call Ben Pobjie, but if I am totally honest, most of those parts are regrets. I am constructed of shame and humiliation and a wistful yearning that things had been different.
How, when regret keeps burning me down, every day, do I continue? How to move into the future when the past keeps eating you like a swarm of beetles?
I have no idea. But I know I have to find a way, somehow, or I’m really going to regret it.