What Are Your Regrets?

Answer 1

--I regret giving up my childhood at the age of ten years, shortly after my parents divorced. Basically I busted my tail starting at ten, to get the education, get into college, get "the job" and so on....and nearly everyone I ran into along the way screwed me over in the end. As in, everyone from careless teachers to lying college advisors telling me my major was going to be useful when it wasn't to so-called therapists and social workers saying "Oh, try this, it'll help..." when it didn't.

So yeah, though my efforts got me out from under the abusive parents....they didn't get me out from under poverty, and I'm *40* now....so yeah, looking back, why did I give it all up for? Why couldn't I have loosened up a little, maybe ran away from home a few dozen times like my sisters did, and maybe had some *fun* or some *friends* to show for it?

Because few things suck harder than being a failure. Being a *Lonely* failure is one of them.

--I also regret staying here in Champaign and trying to make a go of my life here after I had graduated. There was hint after hint after not-so-subtle sign that my workplace reputation was getting ruined by bad jobs after good ones, and that this cold, miserable place just *was not* going to have a place for me in it unless it was at the *bottom* of their society. I should have seen it coming when the local "mental health" services switched gears, in the middle of my last job with them mind you, going from a "recovery" focus to a control-freakish "keep them down and dependent" focus.

I should have got the hell out of dodge when I had the money to do so, and while I had a scrap of physical health left. Not that there are any places left in America where citizens who are poor and have mental health issues *don't* get treated like dirt, but hell, I might have *found one more*.

--I regret being too much of a nerd to hang with the Mexicans in highschool. It wasn't out of any prejudice or anything--my spanish back then was excellent for a second language--but I was too busy with studies.

And I could have had a girlfriend. One lady, one latina in my neighborhood, had the hots for me in high school, and I passed on her. And while I have had *other* lady friends that might have been more romantically inclined later on in life....none of them truly had any sexual chemistry in terms of *that* sort of attraction to me. So yeah, I regret not just the first time, but *every single* time I passed up on an opportunity to date someone in the real, even if I had *good reasons* to do so.

Because it sucks that I have a romantic life....but only online, and never *ever* in the real.

--I regret being born....well, to the family I was born into. I regret being stuck with the consequences of my father declaring bankruptcy (shortly before my birth) and not being able to find solid work *ever again* in his life. I regret his being an abusive, violent, psychotic whackjob. I regret that my mother was in a car accident at the age of 13 years....and that she never fully recovered from *all* of the effects of her disabilities from that. I regret that I was unable to convince mom--except for a very short time after my folk's divorce--to stop with the drinking and smoking she picked up young, because her own parents couldn't afford proper medication to control her seizures.

But mainly I regret that I wasn't able to do enough to even save myself, never mind the rest of my family....that I couldn't keep even *one* of my sisters from becoming a teenage mother and high school dropout....here I was "the smart one" and the one who "was going places" and not only did I myself fall apart, but I couldn't even be all that helpful to my own flesh and blood.

--And I regret....that my one serious suicide attempt that I had, my overdose in my early 20s, didn't succeed.

Really. At the time I survived that, I had been through 3 days of delirium and near-heart failure, and the only thing keeping me alive on day three as I lay on a park bench in a dark corner waiting to die was some words from some sort of "presence":

"Don't die, we have plans for you." this presence kept telling me, over and over.

And now, nearly 20 years later, I look at that and wonder: WTF?? What were those "plans" and what happened to them? Or were those plans more about the amusement of a bunch of malicious old ghosts who were just wanting to see my carcass keep on ticking so they could continue to get the giggles off of my suffering?

Really. *What plans*? If it was indeed divine intervention of some sort that saved me, what plans? Why was I allowed then to fail and slip through the cracks over and over again, worse and worse, if somebody upstairs "had plans" for me? I don't get it.

Why insist I go on living if *people* all around me won't even let me succeed at anything, above and beyond just a bitter, less-than-minimal lonelyass *gutter existence*? I don't get it.

But yeah, those are my *major* regrets so far. Not counting the small, petty stuff from day-to-day.

Any questions? Feel free to email me if you'd like to know more.

Answer 2

...if I only knew "then" what I know now..... and applied it... it's like rain on your wedding day.... a free ride when you've already paid... some good advise that you just didn't take.... and whodda thought.... it figures...