The three lies fueling regret

Situations don’t define us. How we respond to them does.

Photo by Karl Fredrickson on Unsplash

Over the past few years of healing from adrenal fatigue / chronic fatigue / whatever the hell is wrong with me, regret has at times consumed me.

Regret I didn’t have more patience while pursuing my goals.

Regret I got swept away in fear, doubt and insecurity rather than faith and fun.

Regret I neglected taking care of my body in the way it and I deserved.

Sometimes I wonder: how could I do this to myself?

There were certainly extenuating factors. My nervous system was already fragile. I’m a sensitive person who lost her father and sister and survived cancer by 27. Ever since cancer, I’ve struggled with energy and smaller burnouts, like when I tried real estate but had to quit because I couldn’t stop working.

Ultimately, I overrode my body’s signals while pursuing my goals. It’s a pattern I’m working to undo.

That’s been hard to forgive myself for.

We’re not supposed to entertain regret.

It’s useless, they say. We can’t change the past, but only influence the future. Dwelling in regret leaves us ruminating rather than growing.

But like every other thought, emotion or experience we’re tempted to deny, ignoring regret closes us off to growth.

Denying regret is about an unwillingness to confront our humanness, the part of ourselves who does make mistakes and is imperfect and could very well fuckitallup.

That’s our deepest fear, isn’t it? That we mess it all up so irrevocably that nothing can ever be made right again, or that we somehow miss our destiny.

This latest stint of regret wasn’t the first time I thought I destroyed my life.

Ever since reading Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums in high school, my biggest goal has been to write about my life experiences in a way that highlights deeper life lessons. (And Kerouac’s On The Road inspired the name of my Substack.)

My lifelong dream was to travel the world, do crazy things and write about it.

Eventually I became a small-town newspaper reporter, but after cancer, abandoned that to freelance write.

Around this time, I found myself living in Arizona, where I had moved to be with the man I later married, and realized I HATED the desert. Unfortunately, for many reasons, I couldn’t move.

Regret consumed me. My mind had no room beyond thoughts of how my life was over.

I regretted moving to Arizona. I regretted moving to a stupid small town to be a stupid newspaper reporter. I regretted every single choice leading to that moment.

As goes the story I’ve told many times, I surrendered, did a 40-day yoga practice, a lot of inner work, and a few months later, started posting on Instagram, and soon after that, began my (first) blog.

Posting on Instagram changed my life.

It sounds cheesy, but it’s true.

All my life, I’d quit countless blogs after one post, abandoned first drafts of novels, even gave up transforming my poems into songs. (If only I had a good voice, I’d have been a pop star!)

But on Instagram, it felt like I’d finally found my place in life. My purpose. My readers.

People commented on the things I wrote! They joined my newsletter, and later they joined my first course, modeled after the 40-day yoga practice I’d just completed.

My dreams were coming true!

Then things changed.

My second course launch didn’t go as swimmingly as my first. Self-doubt grew. Instead of questioning my strategy, I questioned my value.

Also, Instagram removed the chronological feed.

Slowly the community I’d work so hard to build, the community I’d dreamed of all my life, quieted down. Sharing my writing on Instagram healed me in a weird way, and that emotional attachment to the platform glued me to it. 

I wasted years of my life trying to figure out how to get my message heard on a platform that was no longer geared to what I wanted to share, and with each passing day, the frustration only fueled my commitment to try harder. Work more. Figure it out at any cost.

Instead of exploring new avenues to reach readers, I watched helplessly as my dreams drifted away.

I mined all my past decisions, looking for those that put me here, in a place where everything I worked so hard to create was falling apart.

Regret.

In the rush to recapture what I thought was lost, I forgot my longest, most sincerely held dream — to write about my journey through life and share the lessons learned.

I was still doing it, in a sense, but the result mattered more to me than the art. My words were authentic, but more geared toward selling my courses than sharing my heart.

During the years of resting, these events churned in my mind.

If only I’d made better choices. If only I’d recognized that the adrenaline pulsing through my body wasn’t excitement, but fear.

Regret. It can eat you alive if you let it. It can sentence you to a life of always looking backward, never forward. The self-flagellation will kill your imagination, cloud your vision, infuse bitterness into your dreams. Releasing regret and realizing your potential depends on your ability to give yourself grace for being human.

This brings us to the first lie that fuels regret: We should have known better.

Should you have? But you didn’t.

There’s nothing wrong with that.

I believe we’re not only alive to realize our innate potential, but also to grow and learn soul lessons, not to be perfect.

We all have higher and lower selves, shadow sides and light, potential but also mess.

We think should know better, but at some level that’s wishful thinking because if we’d known better, we’d have done better.

Of course some part of us does know better, but doing things that don’t serve us, or that don’t align with our higher being ultimately illuminates areas where our human selves need growth.

This week, my blog almost didn’t go out on time because I spent the morning reading all my favorite new Substack writers. Do I know better than to spend so much time on social media that I miss my own deadline? Absolutely.

In the past would I have pushed myself, working late into the night to release the blog anyway? Absolutely.

I should know to stay focused, take breaks, be a perfect person who meets deadlines and cares for her health, but I’m not.

I’m an imperfect person with an Internet addiction who’s chronic health condition is teaching her how to care for herself.

Instead of beating myself up over the regret of wasted time, I can remember this frustration and channel it to make better decisions next time.

(Thankfully my husband picked up groceries on the way home, so I was able to finish everything and still fit in Pilates and yoga nidra.)

We're always growing in some areas, regressing in others, and always continuing to move forward somehow, despite it all. That's life.

This brings us to the second lie that fuels regret: That our mistakes could ruin our lives, create situations we can’t recover from.

Is it possible to ruin your life? I'm not sure it is.

Many times while healing from chronic fatigue, I worried I'd irrevocably messed things up. But the most beautiful thing about life is the infinite number of chances to begin again.

Situations don’t define us. How we respond to them does.

When it comes to regret, we compare our imperfect current reality with an image of perfection in our minds that doesn’t actually exist. It’s a false comparison.

We wonder: if I had acted differently, would I have what I long for?

Nothing is perfect, neither this reality nor the alternate path we wonder about. Regret is fueled by the lie that if only we had chosen differently, everything would be perfect. But nothing is perfect.

And perhaps, even with all our current problems, we made the better choice.

Playing this out, if I hadn’t burned out, perhaps I would have built a hugely successful business that made me feel miserable and trapped, with a severed disconnection to my true art. Or perhaps my body could have better withstood the stress I placed it under for a little longer, but ultimately experienced a more devastating health result.

I’ll never know. Most likely, the resulting circumstances wouldn’t be better or worse, just different.

There is no perfect choice because there is no perfect world. And sometimes beautiful things come from less-than-ideal circumstances.

I regretted moving to Arizona so much, but living there, in a part of town with no good job opportunities in my field, was the catalyst for following my dreams.

Our tiny human brains and eyes can only see and understand the most infinitesimal fraction of our universe. Who are we to say what makes a bad decision? Sometimes the things we regret lead to the best things of our lives, our bad choices vindicated with time. Meanwhile sometimes things we thought were awesome can lead to the worst things.

You can always make the most of where you are.

The third lie that fuels regret is that we could miss our destiny, our fate. 

We worry about knocking on the wrong door, going down the wrong path, and somehow ending up someplace other than where we’re supposed to be.

This fear used to plague me. I always felt like I was supposed to be somewhere else, doing something else. Trouble was, I had no clue what that was, and feared that if I didn’t figure it out, I’d mess up my entire life.

That’s impossible because destiny isn’t something we find outside ourselves. It’s inside, a fundamental part of who we are.

An idea that’s recently inspired me is the Acorn Theory from James Hillman, a Jungian analyst.

Hillman says we’re all born with an image inside of us, a fate to realize. Something more than an inner potential, but an otherwordly attendant spirit that lives along side us with its own agenda to realize through us.

The acorn might try to grow into a rose bush, but try as it might, it won’t work.

Similarly, we may try to grow into things that aren’t ours to grow into.

We are not acorns, but humans with souls, and when we do things out of alignment with our true selves, our soul talks back through physical or emotional pain and suffering.

These experiences aren’t meant to be medicated away; they’re invitations to grow, just like regret.

Even if we ignore these signs and continue down the wrong path, our time isn’t wasted. It can’t be. Everything is either a lesson or a blessing.

Truthfully, we never know if we’re getting it right.

I like to think of our potential developing like a Polaroid picture.

The image exists as soon as the paper shoots out of the camera. Yet it’s only after time and proper exposure to light that the picture darkens, allowing us to fully see the image.

Our destiny, unearthing our true selves, is like that.

Except we’re only human, doing the best we can.

We can’t see the image on the Polaroid picture; only God knows. That's why we need to give ourselves grace for living the best way we know how, while trusting fate, which guides our lives with a stronger hand than many of us are willing to admit.

The key is to align your life to who you really are — your values, talents, needs, desires and innate characteristics, while trusting your intuition to guide you.

As you do that, you will expand naturally into the person you’re meant to be.

I’ve always believed this — it’s the premise of my Listen to Your Heart guided journal, which helps people align their lives to who they really are, which is ultimately the larger purpose in life.

We’re bound to make mistakes and have regrets. That’s part of the process.

Ultimately, everything I regret worked out for the best because I worked to make the most of it.

I may regret spending too much time trying to figure out Instagram, but next time I’ll know I’m being guided to something better.

I regret going off the rails with my health, but those mistakes forced me to learn how to deeply care for myself. Ironically, dealing with chronic fatigue will help me become the best, strongest, most vibrant version of myself.

I spent months regretting something earlier this year that caused my fatigue to relapse, making it impossible to pursue my goal of focusing on YouTube.

But without that relapse, I wouldn’t have found Substack, which honestly feels like an answer to my prayers. This place, with my new blog On The Road, feels like full circle, back at the start, connected to who I really am and what I’m here to express. Living my purpose.

That’s not in spite of my mistakes, shortcomings and failures, but because of them.

Regret is an opportunity to redirect our lives, a chance to waste less time rather than more time.

So when all is said and done —

I regret nothing.

Did you find this post valuable? If so, I’d deeply appreciate your support by liking, commenting or sharing it. It helps more people find my work. If you want more posts, consider subscribing.

On the Road is free today, including these bonus journal prompts:

1. What are things you regret? What is the story you tell yourself around those regrets? What are you afraid these situations say about who you are, are not, or about what is or isn’t possible for you?

2. What things are you resisting in your life as a result of that regret? What negative thought patterns or habits correspond with that resistance?

3. What blessings or opportunities are you maybe not seeing because of this resistance or regret? What fears or stories are stopping you from taking advantage of these opportunities?

4. What do you need to let go of to create more space in your life? What do you need to know to ride the flow of fate and turn obstacles into opportunities?

5. What is your right next step?

Thank you so much for reading!

‘Till next time,

Suzanne

Further reading:

The Soul’s Code by James Hillman

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig (The main character, after choosing to die, gets to explore all the paths not taken.)

Listen to Your Heart guided journal by Suzanne Heyn / Soul Scroll Journals

* Some links are affiliate links and I may receive a portion of your purchase at no cost to you. Thanks for your support!

Receive a guided journal for free by referring new subscribers to On The Road! All you have to do is share your unique link, and you’ll receive points for every person who signs up using it.