You're Not Living Until You're Living Without Regrets
These things shape us into the people we are, and the scars they leave make us stronger.
getty By Kait MacKinnon
I haven’t lived a particularly hard life. But it hasn’t been easy either.
But what makes me particularly proud of myself, is that I live without regrets and I live in the moment. Very rarely do I find myself wishing I would have done something differently or longing to live in an earlier period of my life.
The choices you make, the decisions you make, and the things you decide to do are stepping stones to your future.
Even the smallest, seemingly irrelevant turn of events can determine a whole chain reaction in your life.
And I don’t regret any of those choices because I can recognize just how much each individual person has shaped me, and that’s something that a lot of people spend their whole lives trying to figure out.
I don’t regret the decisions I made for my education.
I don’t regret giving my love to the wrong people who didn’t deserve it.
I don’t regret telling the people I loved that I loved them, even when they didn’t love me back.
I don’t regret telling people to F off when I’ve had enough.
I don’t regret the struggles I’ve been through with my mental health.
Why? Because each of these events has made me a stronger person.
I know that life can get bad, but I also know I’m going to come out on the other side, alive and stronger than I was.
My point is that we shouldn’t live regretting things, especially those things that are beyond our control.
We can’t control who we fall in love with and we certainly can’t control who loves us back. We can’t control how people decide to treat us. But we can control how we react to it and we can decide to do something about it. We can decide to tell them we love them.
We can decide to cut the toxic out of our lives, especially when they treat you with no respect.
Spending our time regretting those things — or anything, really — is time wasted, because the harsh truth is that there just really isn’t anything we can do about it now.
It happened, it’s in the past... we can’t change it now. It’s gone and we can’t get it back, no many how many ways you spin it. It isn’t healthy to dwell on the things that we can’t do anything about.
These things are the past. The best thing we can do is learn from it and not let it define us.
These things shape us into the people we are, and the scars they leave make us stronger. If we can learn from them, then, in the end, they aren’t things we should regret.
Sure, it’s okay to wish that things had happened a little bit differently than they did, but if you really take the time to think about it, those events likely played an integral part of your life and led you to become the person you are today.
You’re here, and you’ve made it to today. You should be proud, and you shouldn’t spend too much time concerned with the past.
Kait MacKinnon is a writer who focuses on relationships, love, and mental health topics. Her work has been featured on Huffington Post, Elite Daily, and Thought Catalog.