The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward(26)

Said a forty-eight-year-old Ohio man:

    I regret not being more adventurous . . . taking time to travel, explore, and experience more of what the world has to offer. I let the fear of disappointment rule me and allowed others’ expectations to be more important than my own. I was always the “good soldier” and worked hard to please those around me. I have a good life—I just wish I had more experiences to share with others. Someday . . .



Boldness regrets, as with the Ohio man above, are often about exploration. And some of the most significant exploration, respondents said, is inward. Authenticity requires boldness. And when authenticity is thwarted, so is growth. The most telling demonstration of this point came from several dozen people from all over the world who described their regret—their failure to be bold—with the same five words: “Not being true to myself.”

People who asserted their identities rarely regretted it, even when those identities ran counter to the dominant culture. People who suppressed their identities talked about denying themselves the potential to live fully.

Take this fifty-three-year-old Californian:

    I regret not coming out as a gay man sooner. It definitely impacted how I showed up and my performance and connectedness with my colleagues.



Or a fifty-year-old Massachusetts woman:

    As a minority woman and immigrant, I regret not speaking up or educating when others ridiculed me because of my accent, skin color, and culture.



Or this submission, from a thirty-six-year-old New Yorker:

    I regret not coming out as a lesbian to my parents early in life. I spent a lot of years pretending I’m straight, and [have] never been able to tell the world that I love a woman.



Sometimes the ultimate act of boldness involves the risk of using one’s voice in ways that might rattle others but that clear a new path for oneself.





TRAINS, PLANES, AND SELF-ACTUALIZATION


Bruce never threw out Sandra’s letter. He intended to. He even thought he had. But after one of our conversations, he began digging through old boxes and discovered it among a pile of papers. He hadn’t seen it in forty years. “Sandra’s handwriting resonated in my memory,” he told me. Her loopy letters “looked familiar from the word games we played on paper.” He even scanned the letter and emailed me a copy.

But he didn’t show it to his wife. Bruce has been married since the mid-1980s, and has two adult children. But he’s never told his wife the story of the train or mentioned either the woman or the letter. It’s not that he believes she would consider it a betrayal. It’s more because of what such a conversation might expose.

“I wouldn’t bring myself to say I regret my marriage, but it’s also been a very difficult one,” he said. “There are lots of reasons for staying married. And part of it is that you say you will.”

“Do you ever think about what would have happened if you had gotten out at that stop in Belgium?” I asked him.

“I have. But I also don’t let myself think about it too much because that will create a new regret. I don’t want the regret to be the foundation for a gigantic infrastructure of regret!” he joked.

Yet after reading the letter again, he posted a message in the “missed connections” section of Craigslist Paris in the slim hope of locating Sandra. It’s a lone flare sent into forty years of darkness—a flailing and perhaps final attempt to answer “What if?”

Should he find her—with the two once-young passengers now in their sixties—Bruce wouldn’t make the same mistake again. He’d seize the chance to spend time with her, no matter what came of it.

All deep structure regrets reveal a need and yield a lesson. With boldness regrets, the human need is growth—to expand as a person, to enjoy the richness of the world, to experience more than an ordinary life.

The lesson is plain: Speak up. Ask him out. Take that trip. Start that business. Step off the train.

    “I regret not fighting this kid Ray in the summer of 1991. I walked away and always regretted not standing up for myself.”

Male, 44, Nebraska

//


“I regret having an abortion. I was young, in college, and scared, but it has haunted me ever since.”

Female, 34, Indiana

//


“Taking so long to come out as lesbian.”

Female, 32, Brazil





9.


    Moral Regrets



Kaylyn Viggiano had been married only a year when a man who’d recently befriended her and her husband, Steven, stopped by their apartment unexpectedly. Kaylyn was twenty-one at the time. She and Steven had met in high school, and they’d grown up near each other on the outskirts of Chicago amid a tight cluster of friends and extended family. Now they were living deep in Southern California, two hours from the Arizona border, where Steven, a U.S. Marine, was stationed. Life wasn’t easy. Kaylyn had left nursing school when Steven started boot camp, and she followed him first to Virginia and next to this dry patch of desert where she knew almost nobody.

The friend, another Marine, had arrived when he knew Steven would not be home. He told Kaylyn—falsely—that Steven had been informing his colleagues that he no longer loved Kaylyn and was planning to leave her. Kaylyn—young, lonely, vulnerable—believed him. They had a few drinks, then a few more. And that led to Kaylyn’s entry in the World Regret Survey two years later: