Resting Regrets
Whenever I find myself spouting philosophy and intellectually demanding viewpoints on the grand scheme of existence, my first instinct is to make sure there is no one else around to witness a sixteen-year-old with a sadly lacking amount of life experience pondering the meaning of life. My second is to bury the thoughts and do something appropriately teenage, like reading novels of questionable content and fawning over attractive celebrities, because if there’s anything as frustrating as being dubbed immature, it’s being pretentious. Immaturity, after all, is something that can be cured, and usually is as one ages; pretentiousness, on the other hand, is something that is much more prone to stick to you for the rest of your life.
Even so, there is something to be said for teenage opinions - and yes, maybe I say this only because I am a teenager, but having consumed literature from old men, middle-aged women, children, and everything in between, I’ve come to the conclusion that generally, the thoughts of people of all ages are interesting and valid enough to be heard. Teenage thoughts in particular just happen to be the type I have, and the type I am most capable of understanding, so with this reasoning in mind I shall proliferate on a perhaps un-teenage topic of debate: regret. I am sure that everyone alive has regrets, from not eating the last donut before a younger sibling snatched it, to missing the opportunity to make the acquaintance of someone who may have become a best friend. Regrets are something that haunt the back of everyone’s minds, and can twist your memories of the past as well as affect your decisions in the future.
In relation to myself, regrets definitely take up at least fifty percent of the space in my brain not occupied by the necessary components that enable me to keep myself alive. Waking up, I regret not sleeping earlier because now I will definitely be late to school; eating breakfast, I regret eating so much at dinner because now I am bloated and cannot consume as much of the pancake as I’d otherwise be able to. Meeting up with friends, I regret not keeping in regular contact with them and ending up with the sole topic of school we can talk about; sitting down with my parents, I regret not being as good a daughter as I should have because now most of our interactions take the form of arguments. It is by no means pleasant, but while it induces frequent melancholy, I cannot say that it’s without its benefits. For example, with the lingering guilt in my mind from the last time I ate two pounds of grapes in one sitting, I have ample motivation to not repeat the same feat. Alternatively, with the lingering hunger from skipping dinner, I have ample motivation to never skip another meal again because that will make me miserable.
At sixteen, I am not nearly wise enough to preach the benefits of regrets to one’s character. I’ve not collected enough of them, for one, and I also intensely dislike them because they have the discomforting tendency to obstruct my thought processes by turning everything morose. Even so, I’m not so foolish as to dismiss them entirely, because as much as I hate explosively crying in the shower about something I did two years ago, I also know that I’d like the person I am because of that experience a little less. Errare humanum est, and all that - mistakes are not necessarily detrimental, and they help us grow into a better version of ourselves. It’s a lesson that’s taken sixteen years to learn, and is still being taught by every new experience in my life; it’s a bitter lesson, but one I appreciate all the same.
