Photo by Marc-Olivier Jodoin on Unsplash
I’ve never been a particularly regretful person.
Not because I make good decisions. That is not the reason at all. No, it is due either to a sort of natural optimism I have or a diminished ability to understand consequences. 2020, I hope, will be an exciting year of figuring out which one it is.
But recently, I’ve realized a few things were a poor use of mental energy. It’s not that I regret what I did or, as they always say, what I didn’t do, but the way I thought.
The first regret hit me while I was performing a Marie Kondo on my closet a few weeks ago. It seems minor, but it made me think. As I sadly got rid of clothes I liked but never wore, I realized how often I had bought a size small, just because I could fit myself into it, when a medium or large would have been more comfortable. I wonder why I pursued not even being the smallest size possible but qualifying as the smallest size possible. Changing the label on your jacket does not make any difference to your body. It is not an effective diet. It just means that you won’t be able to move your arms freely for the entirety of winter.
I also regret the amount of time I spent wondering who was right and who was wrong in a variety of conflicts. I realized in 2019 that when two people hate each other, they are probably both right. They always are to some extent—just as they are also wrong. The quest for some kind of objective truth that justifies all your own feelings and actions is a jump down a rabbit hole at best. And it’s the wrong question to ask. Figuring out why you should have gotten something is much less helpful than figuring out why you didn’t and how you can change that.
At work I dealt with a minor complaint recently, and while my first impulse was to be offended, it’s not useful. It doesn’t really matter if the complaint was deserved. What matters is that it happened, and if I don’t want it to be made again, I should address it in the most effective way possible, regardless of my opinion of the complainer. Understanding their motives will help me figure out the best approach, but deciding they don’t deserve for me to listen to them overlooks the fact that I don’t want to be complained about.
On a related note, I regret all the energy I spent on moral outrage, fuming about how “they should know not to behave like that” when I could have just said, “Please don’t do that,” and it wouldn’t have been done. At the back of my mind I knew I could get the results I wanted if I handled the other person intelligently and maturely, but I would only do so if I felt they had behaved in a manner that made them worthy of such cooperation. And usually, for me to feel that they deserved this enlightened treatment, they could never have done anything wrong for me to discuss with them in the first place. Surprisingly, this approach does not have a high success rate.
I regret trying to change feelings I’ve had but didn’t like instead of using them as objective information about my self and my values. I used to really dislike the idea that “all feelings are valid” because many people react emotionally in ways that do not seem fair to me. But feelings themselves are very logical. People just don’t know where they really come from. If you are upset by something, you have a good reason for it. It may not be that someone wronged you. But there is something bothering you that makes sense, whether it’s an emotional issue of your own or a behavior of someone else’s that you can’t tolerate. It always has meaning. To ignore that is to give up the only reliable source of information you have on how to find your own happiness.
A common theme in all of these regrets of mine is a refusal to accept reality. But this is the heart of it:
It doesn’t matter what size I think I should be.
It doesn’t matter how I should feel.
It doesn’t matter what I should be happy with.
It doesn’t matter how other people should behave.
What matters is what actually happens.
It’s as if I’ve been going through life with green hair, and because I don’t like green hair, I go around hoping people will tell me it’s actually aquamarine or turquoise instead. Nothing people say or I tell myself changes the color of my hair in reality. And instead of this odd game of trying to change something without actually changing anything, I could just dye my hair. But first I have to admit there is a problem, but I guess we don’t want to do that because we’re scared we can’t fix it, and all we’ll have done by acknowledging it is ruin our ability to live in a deluded little bubble.
I hope that 2020 is a year of looking in the mirror, and, if I genuinely want to, dyeing my hair.
Half-Blood Kuwaiti 