I try to swallow, but I can’t. Regret gets caught in my throat. I run home from the park with tears on the edge of my eyelids; what have I done? My friend and I packed a bag with a ball and headed to the park near our house. We walked there and joyfully ran over to the soccer goals. We shared the field with another kid, probably nineteen or twenty years old, practicing his batting with his dad or maybe a coach. He was amazing. Every ball was sent one hundred yards away, and a few of them almost hit us, even though we were a safe distance. I wanted a baseball, so I snatched it into my bag, and another, and another. I thought I was so sneaky, little 11 year-old me. He saw us. He most definitely saw us. He and his dad walked over and stopped, looking so strangely at us. He came up and asked me to take his baseballs out of my bag with some kind of angry tone. He snarled and I quote “I was nice about this, but any other guy wouldn’t be.” That was scary to me, so we left, and as we walked home, my mind spiraled. I felt bad. I would never ever go back to normal after my first memorable encounter with regret.
Regret takes the shape of a person. One that sits behind you with its hands on your shoulders driving you like a car. When its hands are on your shoulders, you can either let it steer you off the road or release the pressure on the wheel. When you let it steer you off the road, it can look like tires popping, oil leaking out the tank, and windows shattering. Regret can leave me so damaged. When I feel regret, I first feel bad for what I did, then I feel angry that I was so incompetent for this to happen. I end up enraged, engulfed in my own self pity along with the feeling of stupidity and guilt. But then I remember that it was just a baseball, I was just a kid, and I would never ever do something like that again.
On the flip side, there is relieving the pressure of the wheel. I could talk to someone, like family, my dogs, my cat, my teachers, your goldfish. Relieve the pressure, and take control of my wheel, take control of myself.
Regret is smart, and knows when to attack. He is precise, and ever so reluctant to be caught. I think of it like a cop and a criminal who is many strikes down, and an inch away from federal prison. I have fingerprints, shoeprints, DNA samples and all, but all roads lead nowhere. He is intelligent, yet cocky, leaving behind a few too many clues, but I will catch him, I’m sure of it. Regret is a commendable foe, I just won’t ever fight him, unless I can fight within myself. without me, he wouldn’t have anyone to sharpen up his skills upon.
I am my own worst enemy in this battle, as regret only appears after I trip and can’t get back up. Or when I make small slip ups in my actions like when I stole that baseball, or when told my sister she was a loser, or when I yelled at my parents and slammed my door in their faces. In a way, I don’t only contribute to the problem, I cause the whole problem itself. I can’t control when he strikes, it almost seems random, he makes the severity of the issue intensify, whether it was a small slip up, or something that could ruin the way I view myself. I could act differently, but instead I unintentionally turn a blind eye to my decision making, and my ability to control my feelings of guilt and regret. I could have not taken the baseball, I could have not said that, not said this, not joined this team, not been friends with him, not been friends with her, but I did, and I just let the awful feelings settle in my stomach, clog my skin, flow through my blood, and stick in my brain. There are no ways I can make myself make the right decisions, but just go with my gut. No one is perfect, so why do we have to be? I can’t go back in the past to fix something that sculpted my character.
I think about my regrets every day, and they claw away at my throat every morning I wake up, every night before I sleep, before every meal I eat, and every person I talk to. It sticks with me, and who else does it have to bother. I am greatly impacted by the way regrets make me feel. Some days feel like I want to shrivel up like a deflated balloon, but some days I want to fly off the ground and break out of the roof because I just for a slight moment had broken free from the string that held me to the floor. Sometimes I weigh the outcomes, and always try to think of what could happen if I do this or that. My regrets can push me to make decisions that I don’t think of, and whether big or small, they pile up. I have learned to think before I act, but it sometimes doesn’t even work. We need to resolve our differences, and I need to do my part in making the right choices, when it comes to weighing outcomes. I need to have my own self compassion, to out-think my regret, and in the end, use it to my advantage to make me better.
By Johnny B- 8th