How Embarking On a Regret-Free Life is Reshaping the Course of My Story
In response to Dancing Elephants prompt 1 of Life Column
I am committed to living a life of no regrets.
No, it didn’t happen overnight. I consciously took this decision a few years back after freeing myself from a toxic long-term relationship.
That was step 1 in my journey embarking on the path of living a regret-free life.
Some may immediately assume that this might have something to do with living a hedonistic lifestyle, but that is not the intent of what I’m discussing here.
I have often beaten myself thinking about what I did wrong in this lifetime or a previous one to deserve a partner whose cruelty at times knew no bounds. At other times I would blame myself for not standing up for myself and leaving sooner.
It is deeply heart-wrenching when your own friends tell you to have some self-respect and move on instead of enduring life as a doormat but basking in the warm glow of secure relationships, they never grasped the profound impact of trauma bonding or how deeply it can run.
Or the power of gaslighting.
To be repeatedly called stupid and a waste of space until you really begin to believe that it is the truth. To be brainwashed that nobody else will have you other than the ex whom you better believe is doing you a favor by keeping you.
I never spoke up because I was so ashamed — of myself and of letting on what a failure our family life was in the midst of all the seemingly happy families in our friend circle.
The turning point was a choice between living a life as a dead person or dying and finally being at peace.
Since the latter didn’t work out I decided to live and live I did.
I am glad I chose life because otherwise, I would never have been able to recognize the gaslighting for all the hogwash it was.
Forget the fact that nobody would have me, I have been ardently pursued by high-level executives and one doctor/entrepreneur whom I was in a relationship with. Interestingly this has nothing to do with dating apps or me actively looking for a partner. I attribute these connections more to my personality than anything else.
Score one for giving my authentic self the opportunity to emerge and flourish after all those years lying dormant.
I am proud of myself not only for breaking out of a relationship that sucked up my identity and spat out a zombified Stepford version but also for finding strength in the aftermath, a resilience many struggle to discover choosing instead to drown in bitterness and resentment.
How did I do that? Reflecting on past regrets and implementing two transformative steps which have immensely helped to rebuild my life from the wreckage.
Self-forgiveness
By doing something that sounds relatively simple but perhaps is one of the hardest things to do. And that is self-forgiveness.
I forgave myself for not having any boundaries. I forgave myself for not safeguarding my well-being. I forgave myself for believing that my ex loved me despite everything he did to the contrary. I forgave myself for being timid and helpless. Most of all I forgave myself for bowing down to the pressure of a conservative culture where good wives are expected to forgive, forget, and turn a blind eye to the obvious.
Again, this did not happen overnight.
It involved a decision to overcome the stigma my culture associates with mental health and participate in a support group. It demanded significant introspection, inner exploration and open discussions about my emotions. Engaging in journaling and eventually blogging as a therapeutic outlet helped me make peace with and put to rest some very painful memories.
In other words, finding myself was and continues to be a process.
Rewriting my narrative
One of my biggest regrets was the absence of potential experiences that typically make up a normal and healthy relationship. They never occurred either because my ex was trying to teach me a lesson for some perceived slight or a means of reminding me that I was more of a burden than a wife.
As a result, I have very few happy memories from that part of my life.
Rather than fixating on circumstances I cannot change, I actively chose to pursue the things I yearned for but wasn’t able to do back then.
Flashback: You see, the entire time I was married, my ex never held my hand once the idealization stage was over. He preferred walking ahead of me and in the company of other people. Sometimes I wonder if he’d have noticed if I simply vanished into thin air — I mean how’d he know what happened when he was always walking at least a hundred feet ahead of me?
One memory that stands out to me was a historical tour of a prestigious university campus my ex and I had taken. Towards the end, I lagged further and further behind just to see how long it would take for him to notice I wasn’t part of the tour group.
He didn’t until the very end of the tour because he was so caught up covering with his newfound friends. And I, predictably, got an earful for not keeping up.
A reason for that weird behavior was he was contemptuous of me being such a doormat but he would have had it no other way.
Go figure.
I am not ashamed to say I have longed for the intimacy of a lover’s warm hug and the bonding that comes from the simple act of holding hands. What better way to say I love you and you mean the world to me?
Recently, I got to rewrite that regret in a very sweet way. I signed myself and my current boyfriend up for a historical tour of a world-renowned university based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Suffice to say, it was a completely different experience from my first one.
There was plenty of hand holding, spontaneous hugs, stolen kisses, delightful whispers and picture taking. The fun filled day etched itself into my memory as an inedible and enjoyable experience thereby effectively replacing the previous, less savoury one as the cherished memory I’d always carry with me.
As you can see, no regrets there, only happiness stemming from deliberate choices to reshape the course of my story.
This post was inspired by the thought-provoking prompt by Dr. Preeti Singh
