When your regrets crawl into bed with you

I’m lying in my couch holding a glass of red wine in my hand, the cd player is on, I hear Edith Piaf’s wonderful and characteristic voice singing: “Non, rien de rien… Non, je ne regrette rien…” I have no regrets she says.

“Do you have any regrets?” I whisper to myself, drinking some more wine. The wine is sweet but my regrets are anything but. Yes, my regrets haunt me like ghosts from the past. They come and crawl into my head late at night, their favorite time of the day, when I am alone in my bed . Torturing me and making me feel guilty for the choices I’ve made, or even worse, the ones I didn’t make. But my regrets are not my choice. They’re my frustration.

Regrets are the sorrow that I feel every time I think about the past. The alternatives that I had, the choices that I was given. The past loves I threw away and the ones that I kept. And, as most, my biggest regrets are ones concerning my love life.

You can’t have it all in life, can you? You must choose your path.

“What could have happened if things were different?” that is the question that is stuck in my head years now. “Would I have been happier if I had chosen something else? Someone else?” My life is filled with missed opportunities. There is a big gap between my present and the possible present that I visualize and I’ve idealized in my mind. Over played scenarios. And that perfect present that I create, is so much prettier, better and complete than the one I live in.

I should have paid more attention to my intuition. If only I had listened to that feeling. Thoughts like that are making me ache. It’s a miserable and torment feeling. But I have to live with it. Regrets keep me tied to my past; with heavy unbreakable chains, not letting move, not letting me let them go. They constantly beat me with guilt and want me to have a rewind so I can change things up. Off course I have made my choices. Off course I can’t correct anything that belongs in the past.

I don’t know any more how to live with them. “Never look back, unless you’re planning to go that way,” Henry David Thoreau famously said. I found it very difficult to do that. My regrets keep my company on a night like this, which I try to enjoy my red wine. And they are very judgmental. They keep pushing me back all the time. They are my present devourers. They only want me to live in the past.

I try to convince myself that I did the best I could. That my choices were right. Regrets are a big lesson that it is going to teach me to be careful in the future. That I didn’t know any better. But now I do. I won’t make the same mistakes again. I will move forward. I have to convince myself that I can’t change the past. I can’t recycle things over and over again. There’s no point on doing that anymore.

As the song says:
“Non, rien de rien, Non, je ne regrette rien, C’est payé, balayé, oublié, Je me fous du passé !”
“No, nothing at all, No, I regret nothing. It’s bought and paid for, wiped away, forgotten, I don’t give a damn about the past! “

And that’s exactly what I am going to do. My past is my past – mine. My regrets are mine too and it’s high time to stop them from crawling into my bed and into my mind.
Cheers!