Recognizing Regret

“In history as in human life, regret does not bring back a lost moment; a thousand years will not recover something lost in a single hour."

~ Stefan Zweig

Would you rather fulfill your greatest wish or resolve your greatest regret?

This is a hard question for me to answer.

Welcome to my new series on a difficult topic - Regret. I would love to share my recent experience with you so that we may inspire, uplift, or simply encourage each other and do not feel alone in difficult times.

If you are my fellow subscribers, you may have already known that I was traveling on a hard road this past Spring semester. I guess we may all have our down time, so I dared to share my thoughts on overcoming regret after being “defeated.”

Before I share my story, I want to give a heads-up that this first blog is going to be the heaviest in this three-part series. :(

At the beginning of the Spring semester, I didn’t feel ready to come back to college. I was still exhausted from the Fall. Instead of feeling excited, I felt that I was called back to the trenches. Spring is usually a symbolic season for rebirth and new beginnings, while I was hit by unexpected/unprepared changes and challenges.

My massive expectations soon turned into broken dreams. As I looked upon people and places for comfort and happiness, my feelings were proved to be disappointing and unreliable.

I felt stressed.

I felt alone.

I felt lost.

Before I knew it, my mental health plummeted. If you’ve been following my blogs, you probably noticed this. As I battled on to stay afloat, people whom I loved most, sank, too, while others were proved to be imperfect. My dreams and expectations became further unreachable; I started seriously doubting myself.

Suddenly, I felt I understood why people may want to end their lives.

I felt so alone.

I felt so down.

I felt so depressed.

As I wrote in an earlier blog, “I've been struggling with being in a hole since the semester started. It's also the first time that suicidal thoughts have surfaced in my mind. I wished I could just kiss my worries away. Or better yet, go into a deep sleep and don't wake up till everything is over.”

I felt myself sinking deeper and deeper into a hole that I couldn’t climb up. I refused to plan how to end my life nor did I ever intend to write a suicide note. But I remained in depression.

The world, in my perspective, was bleak and hopeless. It grew dark and hateful, and eventually into a scary place with endless pressing deadlines. Social anxiety and pure pressure almost crushed me.

Although my issues started at the beginning of the Spring semester, the pressure began to ramp up after the Spring break. This was mainly because during those 10 days of the Spring break, I didn’t or couldn’t get anything done. I found my mental health in shambles. I went to a school therapist soon after confessing my stress level to my time management counselor after the Spring break.

I was utterly surprised when my scores came out. My anxiety was sky high, and so was my depression. Growing up, I was told I was shy and there was no need to be nervous. So, anxiety wasn't new to me. But no one called me a Negative Nancy. I had been actually an optimist. Now, my anxiety and depression scores got more alarming, and so was my anger, which surprised me as angry had been an alien feeling for me.

When I look back, it all circled back to one thing - I was drowning in a sea of regret and remorse.

I am thankful to report that I was able to redeem myself. For the last third of the semester (about 6 weeks), I finally scraped out. (Shout out to my friends around this time: You all truly saved my life. Thank you for being the diamonds under pressure.)

Regret is hard to deal with. Regret stings. No sugarcoating, regret can be too real to forget and to get over with.

Yet sometimes we have to allow it to run its course. In other words, I believe it’s important to permit myself to grieve. I can’t clean a bottle until it’s emptied. Give myself sometime to let the tears fall and the anger boil (just don’t boil at others). Anger is natural after a failure but can be unhealthy when we release it to someone who isn’t responsible.

Allowing myself to face my emotions may turn into a force of courage. To overcome regret, I must face myself. Learning to accept that I’m feeling horrible is the first step to recognizing my unsatisfaction, which can give me the motivation to change. If I never face these unpleasant feelings, I may indulge in the delusions. When it eventually bursts, it can cause more harm like Humpty Dumpty; it’s harder to put myself back together again. (Haha, excuse my horrible humor.)

I feel if I allow myself to be feeble, I can move forward without baggage. This doesn’t mean the feeling won’t resurface but it means I, at least, attempted to deal with them. This makes it easier for me to push them away when they come back. Once I’ve learned how to move forward once, it becomes easier to reinforce what I’ve won.

So, when regret comes, cry and punch, just don’t avoid or hide it, as long as regrets are not nurtured. We don’t want regret to intensify, but we want to acknowledge them and start weeding them out.

In the next blog, I’ll talk about what we can do to move on after identifying the source of regret. (And it'll be less, heavy, haha!)

Till Next Time,

Isabelle