~Anne Frank
Regrets are a very personal thing. Regrets are the mistakes we don't talk about and the secrets we pretend not to have.
Regrets eat you up inside. They grip your heart until it's just an aching muscle. But no matter how many times your bitterness consumes you, no matter how many times you overcome the remorse, that regrettable place in the story of your life will always be lacking the mountain you wish you'd climbed. It will always be a mistaken footstep, a choice reversed, a dream left behind, a moment forever slipped away.
But, when it comes down to it, the days in which I did something "regretful" are the days that I regret the least.
Yes, I still prefer to hide my regrets, because after all, they are still my mistakes.
But my mistakes have allowed me to feel things, things like anger that is beyond taming; sadness so deep you forget yourself within it.
My mistakes have allowed me to experience first hand what regret can do to a person. When everything good becomes twisted in the nicks and notches of a croquet heart.
So, to conclude my story of regrets, my biggest regret is trying to push these emotions away instead of embracing them.
I regret seeking to numb myself when I felt broken inside.
There are still parts of myself that I have lost because I tried to run from the things that hurt me. I thrust away the most vulnerable pieces of my heart. I buried it all like corpses in the ground because I had always believed pain to be a weakness.
I had traded away the broken pieces of myself because I thought that if I rid myself of that which had been crippled I would no longer feel the pain. Instead I would simply feel empty.
Now I have found that it was those very pieces of me that were most precious. The most frail and fragile pieces of our souls need the most care because they are so priceless. They are invaluable, inestimable.
Pain is not our shortcoming. We are not incapable of living. Pain is when we must be strongest.
Photo Credit to Heinrich Nikel Photography
I
regret running to the wrong things for comfort. But my biggest regret in life is
trying not to feel. I would rather feel pain and sorrow than to feel dead inside.
If I could live any day again I would choose to feel every aspect of my pain. Because once pain is felt it goes away.
It is when we try not to feel it that it stays.