What's the Number One Thing You Regret?

“There are no regrets, only lessons.”

Actually… I’m not going to make this philosophical with a silver lining, I’m going to be honest…

I regret not listening to my 18-year-old self when she didn’t want a relationship with a man who couldn’t understand that he would not come first.

I regret listening to the people in the church and not to myself, thinking that they knew what was better for me than I knew for myself, because I was, supposedly, “young and dumb” at the time.

I regret allowing a man to make me feel small, apologizing for me when I wasn’t sorry, and completely losing sight of my value.

Was it, in fact, a lesson? Of course.

But I still regret it.

I don’t regret the marriage, I don’t regret being with a good man. I regret not listening to MYSELF when I knew I didn’t want the relationship. I regret DOUBTING myself.

I regret shrinking myself to fit into someone's neat little box.

When he first met me, I was a novelty. A young, beautiful woman with fire, joy, drive, and an unapologetic personality that made people uncomfortable. He loved it… for a time.

While we were dating (I was a teenager and he was in his early 20s), he asked if I wanted children. I didn’t think I did, but every time I answered that question with a no, ‘adults’ would convince me that I would change my mind later down the road: “It’ll be different when they’re your own!” “I didn’t use to want kids either, but…” and my personal favorite, “WHY NOT?!” and they would look at me with incredulity in their eyes. One person even asked, “What’s wrong with you?!” As if not wanting children made me a manufacturing defect.

So instead of saying "no," I replied, “Maybe someday, but not anytime soon,” because maybe the ‘adults’ were right. Maybe I’d find myself ten years down the road wanting a family. But what actually ended up happening ten years later was that I got pregnant and had an abortion.

Up until that time, I had become his whole world, and he had become mine. We orbited around each other as if our relationship was the only thing that mattered and that it would stand the test of time. I rooted myself in that reality… which is why it hurt so much when it ended.

Actually, it didn’t just hurt; I ended up dissociating for several years. Because when you crack the foundation of your very reality, your mind doesn’t take it well.

We ended up divorced within a year, and I reverted back to who I was before I met him. I mentally scrubbed ten years of my life from my memory and put that decade in a large, dark fortress somewhere in my subconscious. Because that’s how I was able to deal with it.

Now, anytime those memories resurface, I mentally and physically run away. I don’t want any reminders of who I became when I was with him, nor reminders of the life I lived near the end of our marriage, which was stifling and lonely.

The first years of our marriage were nice; he would read to me by the fireplace after we had dinner, we’d take road trips to Disneyland, and have game nights. It was simple and sweet.

But by the end, my novelty had worn off, and the abortion had left him bitter.

I had been so sure of myself until I entered a relationship and allowed others to get into my head. Honestly, I had no business getting married before I could legally drink, but I still found myself in a wedding dress before the age of twenty-one.

So when I’m asked if I have regrets, the knee-jerk response is to say, “No, because everything is a learning lesson,” but truth be told, I still haven’t fully forgiven myself for not listening to my own voice when she was screaming to be heard.