I used to work so hard to live without regrets. I’m sure it’s partly the ADHD, where sometimes the only way to free myself from a recurring thought is to do something about it – whether it’s finally buying shoes or shaving my head. And it can be hard to tell what’s worth it: I regret the shoes, but not the head-shaving.
But lately — in this post-pandemic world, where I have changed so much — my regrets have been even bigger. They are not about small actions that make me wince. They’re often situations, people, circumstances that I now recognize as toxic, or painful, or just plain too messy and vulnerable for the pre-pandemic me to navigate. The actions I took were completely natural, they made complete sense to who I was back then, so I used to think I couldn’t regret them. But now, I look at my past me and I see someone so shriveled up in pain she didn’t know how to act in her favor. Now, I see actions I took that I thought of as brave, but were a kind of cowardice I didn’t recognize as such yet.
The main regret I have is constantly playing a role I always felt I was meant to play: the very good best friend to the protagonist. I cannot emphasize this enough. It’s not a role that I thought I was playing – I thought I was playing some weird equivalent to Elizabeth Swann in Pirates of the Caribbean, or Wonder Woman in the show Justice League. For the latter, I specifically mean the Bruce Timm cartoon that aired on Cartoon Network, one of the only chill shows left streaming on Netflix.
At one point, a rogue Amazonian does something to all the men on Earth. Hawkgirl and Wonder Woman work together, on their own, to save half of humanity. At one point, they have this exchange:
Hawkgirl: Who wants to live in a world without men?
Wonder Woman: They can’t possibly be that essential to your life.
Hawkgirl: Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it, princess.
Wonder Woman on the show is constantly confused by the “world of men,” as she calls it. She doesn’t understand makeup or fashion, doesn’t really understand why and how the world works, and finds a lot of the circumstances strange and alien to her. That’s how romance seemed to me, how love approached me. Like a stranger in a dark alley I was meant to beat up.
So instead, I played the best friend. Even if someone loved me, I would be fine being their best friend and nothing else. Especially if they loved me and I didn’t know if I loved them back, or I was unsure if I wanted to be with them, or if I generally found the way they treated their partners as kind of weird and confusing, I was fine being the best friend.
If I loved them back, that seemed entirely inconsequential.
Here’s what’s great about being the best friend: you get to give a lot of love and not get much in return. You get to find out that they have different rules for how they expect to be treated, and how they expect to you to treat them. You get to put people on a pedestal and carefully manage how much they see of you. You get to hide the parts of you that are ugly and imperfect, because – if you’ve chosen well -- you already know they are not of interest to this person.
This year, something in me finally broke, something I knew would have to break if I wrote my novel. For the first time, I had to be the protagonist. For the first time, I had to have flaws and issues and vices – I couldn’t be the good, quiet Indian girl bestie, the one who’s simply shy about love, not just terrified. I could be other people’s emotional worry dolls, punching bags for the feelings they found ugly in themselves that they needed to put towards someone who they could get away with hurting. I let them get away with hurting me.
These people were not obvious in their intentions, I’ll say that. Despite my lack of modifiers, I think when I write this, some people may think I’m mostly talking about straight white men. But I’ve found that selfishness and codependency and childishness come in a range of colors and shapes and sizes. They come in a variety of people that seem, on the surface, to want to grow and change and face themselves. But despite knowing the terms, they don’t care about the truth.
Therapy speak doesn’t make us selfish – selfish people may use therapy speak to justify their actions. But then, I’ve also just asked a friend if we could talk on the phone, and she responded by accusing me of using therapy speak. So there’s more than one way to skin a cat for these people.
I’ve found that the way to get around this – around these people and the roles they expect me to play, around the role I myself default to, and what I’m holding on to in the future – is paying attention to how people make me feel.
When I was in middle school, I read I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou. I’ve been thinking about one quote from her a lot recently:
“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
So. How do people make me feel? By returning the question to my body’s response, my intuitive reaction, I am finding I get much more information about the subject rather than focusing on the details of what happened or who said what. And because of that, I have felt recently that my relationships with others have become a lot more authentic. I realize how much I need other people, how much I like them and love and do want to be around them, when I feel safe enough with them to be my true, authentic self. Sometimes that means fighting for what I’m worth, sometimes that means listening to a friend pushing me to see what I’m worth, and sometimes it means telling other people what they’re worth to me.
Before, I used to fear regret. For a woman with ADHD, where you might overcorrect with a sense of perfectionism, the fact that I made the wrong decision in the past made me so ashamed and scared to even envision a future where I learned from that mistake. But that’s also because I had no sense of scale of the mistakes I made – an awkward comment seemed just as bad as a dismissive action and just as bad as a big fight.
Now I see the difference between something to cringe over, something to sigh over, and – most of all – something to regret. It’s a more sobering, bittersweet emotion, one tied to misunderstanding and miscommunication in the highest order. It’s about misunderstanding yourself and miscommunicating your own needs, your own feelings, your own instincts.
One of my favorite books in recent years is the book The Regrets, where a ghostly protagonist is warned by higher beings not to incur regrets. That line stuck with me, because of how that seemed to be the way I operated in life. But now I see that to live is to incur regrets. Regrets are harder lessons to learn than any other, but that’s what makes them the most permanent.