Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: regrets

Wish I may

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In the Ask A Manager weekend forum, there is a thread about a book focusing on the protagonist being able to see how her life would have been different if she had made different big choices. The Original Poster asked if people had choices in their lives in which they would have made different choices, then added what would you tell your twenty-year old self to change the trajectory of your life.

Most of the comments are from people saying they would not change anything because blah blah blah person they now are. It may be true. Or it may be what they think they need to say. Or it could just be that American can-do, positive toxicity shining through. There were a few people who said they would make different choices, but they were few and far between.

I started a reply in my head, but realized that I probably shouldn’t post it because it would get really negative and really self-indulgent. So I’m going to do it here instead.

First of all, I get what people are saying about if they changed something in their life, they wouldn’t have the life they have today. With concrete examples like, “If I hadn’t married my first husband, I wouldn’t have my child”, that makes complete sense. I feel the same about working at Katahdin, my first job after college. It was a terrible place to work and the people there were mostly really dbad at their jobs. At least one was a horrible human being, too. The lead of my team. He was narcissistic, vain, lazy, and just an all-around creep.

But, it’s where I met K. Who became my best friend and the sister I never had. I love her and cannot imagine my life without her. I have often joked that when we are in our eighties, we’re going to be at the same old folks’ home, heckling the other inmates. So, yes, I would not give up working in that hellhole if it meant not meeting her.

On the other hand, I would definitely have chosen not to date the Thai guy who forced me to have sex with him. And I most certainly owuld nat have stayed with him because of my twisted, fucked-up brain telling me that it was my fault and that I was trapped. I was fortunate that the relationship had an baked-in shelf life as I was returning to America.

But. The reason I stayed with him was because of how I was browbeaten to believe that my sole worth on this earth was what I could offer other people with being an available hole to any man (yes, man) who wanted it an implied secondary lesson.

This is the biggest thing I would change or that I would tell my twenty-year-old self. Hell, I woul tell this to teen-year-old me and fifteen-year-old me as well.


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Wasting your life on regrets

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I come from a long line of worriers. Or rather, one great big worrier–my mother. She is a champion worrier who can turn anything into a chance to fret. It doesn’t matter how big or small a problem is–she can inflate it into a catastrophe. For example. She and my father were at Fresh and Natural, a nearby co-op that has mostly local/organic food. They also have a variety of gluten-free/dairy-free food, which is good for me. Anyway, she called me to ask if there was anything I wanted. I said if she could find some gf/hf backed goods in the same place she got salmon and chicken, I’d be happy. Cupcakes and/or brownies. She called back saying she couldn’t find them and she sounded stress. I said it was no big deal and not to worry about it. But, of course, she had to continue to worry about it. More to the point, she had to voice her worry to me. Now I w as stressed over something that previously had no meaning to me. I told her to forget about it, but she kept ruminating over it.

The incident in and of itself is no big deal. The problem comes because she does this with every decision, big or small. K once marveled as she was taking me to the airport that I had packed for every occasion. I apparently had a roll of quarters and an umbrella and a bunch of other things I probably wouldn’t need for a short trip. I said it was the legacy of my mother. We compared our mothers’ attitudes towards life. Her mother believes that whatever you chose to do, you would be fine. My mother believes that whatever you chose to do, you’ll be fucked. There are pros and cons to both viewpoints, obviously, but growing up with a mother like mine means I’m constantly second-guessing myself. Especially around her.

She can’t just relax and take things as they come. I know it’s in part because of my father. He’s very judgmental and rigid in his view of how things should be. If you don’t follow his unspoken expectations, well , there will be hell to pay. Most of the time. Once in a while, he’ll not care, but that’s very rare. An example. One time, he was mad at my mother and wouldn’t tell her why. I think that’s bullshit in general, but especially when the reason can be as capricious as you didn’t say hi in the right tone of voice. Or more to the point, he didn’t hear you say hi because he refuses to wear his expensive hearing aids. In case he loses one. But, they run out if you don’t use them (just the same as you do) and it’s a waste, anyway. He can’t  see that.


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Shifting perspectives

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My brother once told me that he doesn’t regret any decision he’s made. This was about a decade ago, and it blew my mind. I pushed a bit, and he said there was no point in regret as he couldn’t change anything he’d done in the past. He’s not wrong. Regret in and of itself is useless and can be harming if it causes shame. Shame keeps you stuck in bad behavior more often than not. On the other hand, it’s hard to learn from the past if you refuse to study it at all. I think there *may* be a truism about that floating around the interwebs. Since then, he’s made indications that there are things he might have changed or that he wished had gone a different way, but in general, he is an eyes-forward kind of guy.

I admire that about him. I also envy that about him because I regret almost every decision I’ve made in my life. Where I want to college. Going back to a certain boyfriend twice. Not questioning the narrative he laid out for me because I thought he was trustworthy.

Side Note: I recently talked to my mom about this ex of mine, let’s call him Todd because that’s most definitely not his name. I always held a slight grudge because she and my father had dinner with us once, and they both did not like him at all. I attributed it to my father not liking anyone who wasn’t properly effusive/deferential/in awe of how amazing he is plus a shitload of other unspoken expectations and my mother deferring to him. I found out during our recent talk that the reason she didn’t like him was because he took my love for granted (ironic given her own marriage) and because he caused me so much pain. She said he was using me and he was selfish.

We discussed a bit about how he dumped me three times and came back to me twice and how he lied to me in our relationship about having dumped his ex before she went abroad for a semester. In reality, they were in an open relationship, but only because he insisted. I found out by reading a letter from him to her. Yes, a physical letter. I was looking for something else on his desk, and when I saw a letter from her, I read it. When I brought it up to him, he got mad that I read it. Which, yes, invasion of privacy, but it allowed him to neatly sidestep the fact that he fucking lied to me. Why? Probably because he knew I wouldn’t have agreed to going out with him if he told me the truth. I was very straight and narrow at that time, and I would not have agreed to be in an open relationship. Funnily enough, though, when the girlfriend came back the next semester, he was ‘dating’ both of us at the same time to figure out what he wanted. I started dating someone else, and Todd couldn’t take it after a few weeks.

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Not in This Lifetime

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I saw my last therapist for close to fifteen years. Around the ten-year mark, I said something about regretting that I was still working on some of the same issues that I had been when I first started seeing her. She said something to the effect that if I didn’t work on them then, I would be saying the the same thing in ten more years, except it’d be, “I can’t believe I’ve been working twenty years on this,” instead of ten.

I balked at what she was saying at the time (that’s just how I roll. My first instinct is always to counter what’s being said to me. I’m working on it), and I thought it was trite (which it was, but many tropes have at least a grain of truth), but she’s right. It’s fine to be sad that I haven’t fixed x, y, or z, but unless I work on it, it still won’t get fixed, and I’ll just have wasted more years. Take for example learning a new language. Chinese would be really useful for me to learn, but I would feel weird if I learned it before I learn Taiwanese which is my family’s native language. It would be harder for me to learn it, and I haven’t. I also haven’t learned Chinese. If I had started with that, I would know it by now.

Sigh.

In the past week, I’ve been thinking of my mortality. I’m probably past the half point of my life, and it’s all downhill from here. I jest, but not really. I have a thing that I hate the second half of things because it means the end is nearer than the beginning, and I’m feeling that way about my life right now. There are many things that are probably not going to happen in this lifetime, some for better and some for worse. Let’s start with some of the better ones.

  1. Have kids. WHEW!!! Enough said. Ha! Just kidding. About enough said, not about putting kids on this list. I can’t help but be smug when I remember an argument with a friend twenty years ago about having kids. There were three of us, all in our mid-to-late twenties, and one friend was insisting that I’d be the first of us to have kids. I don’t know why she thought that, but it really pissed the fuck out of me. I’ve known since I was twenty that I didn’t want kids. It’s the only constant in my life. To have someone who didn’t even know me that well tell me that I was going to have kids, aw, hell no. At the time, I thought to myself that I would send her postcard after she had a kid to gloat about it. She has a kid now and so does my other friend (my BFF), and me? Gloriously child-free.
  2. Get married. This is another that I assumed would just happen because isn’t it what every girl dreams of? Not me. I never made my Barbies get married–just have sex. I didn’t dream of my wedding because it seemed more like a nightmare to me. When I got older, I had political problems with it as well. The sexist origins of marriage, the taking of the dude’s last name, etc. Add to that the fact that marriage equality was but a dream when I was a young bi lady, and it was a big fat nope for me. Still, there was a tiny corner of my mind that wanted it for…reasons! I couldn’t articulate why, but I began to see it was to normalize my freak-ass self. I was such a weirdo and had no place in polite society. I had shed vestiges of an acceptable persona all throughout my twenties. I gave up religion, the idea of being a mother, and I had a hard time letting go of walking down the aisle in wedded bliss. What changed my mind? Over time, I realized I didn’t want to be with someone 24/7. I like living alone. I don’t like compromise. I like sleeping by myself. Well, maybe with my cat, but dassit. Any time I thought of marriage, it just seemed like a millstone around the neck. By the time I was thirty, I was done with the idea of marriage.
  3. A romantic relationship. This is in a gray area, but I’m leaning towards the idea that I’d prefer not to have a monogamous, primary romantic relationship. I’ve written about this before, but I’m not good girlfriend material. In addition, I don’t want to commit so deeply to one person. I have great friends that fulfill many of my emotional needs, and all I really am missing is sex. I’ve said it many times, but my ideal sex buddy would be someone with whom I could laugh, talk, eat, watch a sportsball game, then fuck for hours. Then, I’d kick them out and sleep the way I sleep best–alone. I wouldn’t mind having a few of these relationships. The idea makes me smile. When I think of a romantic relationship, there’s a constriction in my chest, and I have a hard time breathing. It feels smothering, which is what I tend to do in relationships.

Those are the ones I’m comfortable with. There are others that I’m less happy about. Let’s start that list now.


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Related, But Not the Same

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tatted up
My lotus blossom is on fiyah!

My brother dropped by the other night, and as always, I marveled that we’re related. I’m not a genetics expert, but I would think two people who’re related would have a few traits in common. He and I get along really well, but we could not be more different. By his own admission, he operates purely on logic. Or mostly, any way. I don’t think many people are 100% Dr. Spock, even if they think they are. He is very rational, though, so it’s easy for him to miss the subtext of what people are saying. I, on the other hand, skew heavily to the emotional side, although I can think rationally when I apply myself. My brother is extremely gregarious. To him, a stranger is just a friend he hasn’t met yet. To me, even my friends can feel like strangers at time. He can talk to people all day long. I get tired after about five minutes of human interaction. He loves to drive; I fucking hate it. He’s married with three wonderful children (one who’s now an official adult!), and I can only look at him in admiration and wonderment because I can’t imagine that life for myself. Nor, may I hasten to add, do I want to. I never wanted kids, and I never wanted to get married. Still. It leaves me out of many conversations because the vast majority of women my age are married and/or have kids.

My brother is a realtor. He’s very good at his job. He likes meeting new people and finding the perfect house for them. To me, that sounds like Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell. The one thing I had to help my brother with was how he emotionally connected with people. We role-played, and he practiced until he was markedly better at it. He likes to have three or four things to do every day. I consider it a job well done if I manage to do one thing a day. He’s better with numbers and computers while I swim in a sea of words. He once told me that he never regretted anything in his life. I stared at him, slack-jawed, unable to process what he’d said to me. Not regret anything? First of all, can anyone really say that?* I mean, not even getting the turkey on rye instead of the ham and cheddar? Secondly, I regret almost everything about my life. One of the reasons I have such a hard time making a decision is because I can always see the negatives about any/all of the choices. Even if it’s not conscious, I often see things as a lose-lose situation.

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