I spent most of my idle thoughts today thinking about someone I haven’t spoken to in almost nine months. I have a lot of people from my past that I haven’t spoken to in various lengths of time, most of them greater than nine months, but this one occupies me in ways that the rest don’t. Most of the rest of these long silences are the result of walls I built or deliberate choices to make a change in my life that took me away from people. Some are the notable ends of long-running and incredibly unhealthy codependent relationships that I was unable to change for the better as I changed for the better–it takes change on both people’s parts to better a relationship like that and I’ve only ever been able to control my own behavior. Some were relationships I ended because they were unhealthy for me, because the other person only ever took from me, because it was clear I could not rely on them when it really mattered, or because I simply grew tired of needing to overlook the ways they frequently hurt me without ever learning to treat me better. Some just faded into silence as time and distance took their toll. Only one was because someone else set a boundry and I have kept my silence for these past nine months out of respect for their request.
Continue readingRegret
Buyer’s Remorse and My Frugal Nature Are the Only Things Keeping Me Playing Fire Emblem: Engage
Even after about forty hours of Fire Emblem: Engage, my opinion of the game hasn’t changed. If anything, I’m starting to feel like I signed up for a task and am personally obligated by my sense of propriety to finish it. Too much of that forty hours is puttering around in chores, trying to do the extra missions, and figuring out the hard way that I’m never going to complete the character support stuff I want to pursue. There’s too much of it and the methods of building support between non-player characters is too frustrating and exhausting to work with. I’ll admit I was pretty spoiled by Fire Emblem: Three Houses, but most of the games before this one also had a huge number of ways to increase inter-character support while the latest entry in the series has battles, meals, and the training stuff that randomly throws another character into a training match with the character you selected. Even thought they’ve added a new support building system since I originally wrote this (more DLC and a free update dropped after last week’s Nintendo Direct), it’s still a very clunky, slow system in a game that gives you a huge number of characters. All in all, it’s a bad system, for a lot of reasons.
Continue readingImagery Sharp Enough To Cut A Reader
As much as I like to grouse about Robert Jordan and The Wheel of Time, reading through the series left a strong impression on me. After all, most of my grousing has to do with bloat and how the story unspools at times, rather than weaves together. Too many instances of unimportant details being emphasized in blocks of descriptive text (a crime I perhaps come down on too strongly because I recognized this issue, magnified, in my own writing) again and again and again. Too much time being skipped over to show the end results and then returned to, to be examined in excruciating detail. Too many plot threads as the story wandered wide over eleven books before Jordan, health failing, tasked Brandon Sanderson with wrapping it all up. Specific, smaller problems that had to do with the background of the reading experience rather than the main focus of it. I enjoyed the series and don’t regret spending time reading through it, but I’ve never been able to make myself read through it a second time, which is unfortunate because there are a lot of singular moments that left a mark on me and my imagination.
Continue readingOne Last Meditation Post, For Now
It can be hard to avoid regrets, sometimes. Life is filled with a variety of experiences and every decision to engage in one means there is one you are missing out on. Everything results in missed opportunities, one way or another, so it can be easy to think of what those opportunities might have been and wish that you’d made a different choice. These regrets, even if you meant only to indulge for a few moments before moving on, can cling to you like burrs for the rest of your life if you aren’t careful to remove them. They rarely disappear on their own and they’re really good at popping up again somewhere else once they’re stuck on you.
A simple wish that you’d made other decisions when it comes to your college education–which would resulted in significantly fewer student loans–can become a whole series of regrets when it shows up as a wish that you hadn’t needed to take a certain job after college that was possibly the most psychologically damaging thing you’ve ever subjected yourself to. A simple wish that you’d decided to try to make a long-distance relationship work instead of ending things when you moved can turn into years of pining and daydreams of what might have been. Regrets are easy to pick up, they are everywhere, and require a lot of work to avoid or get rid of. I still find myself wondering what my life might have been like if I’d stayed in college and that’s a short step away from regretting my decision to move to Wisconsin for college, but I’m still one of the better people I know when it comes to dealing with potential regrets.
In order to entirely avoid regrets, you would basically need to avoid any opportunities, never make decisions, and somehow find peace with yourself after a life of doing nothing and interacting with no one. You would need to cut yourself off from humanity and possibly even your feelings. Avoiding regrets is a terrible idea and is probably the most regrettable thing you could do.
Learning to process regrets and accept your past is far more healthy. Some people get so good at it that they seem almost like they don’t regret anything. As someone who was once one of those people, I don’t think that’s true. I think people just don’t really realize that they’ve learned a skill many people never do. It can be difficult for people to process regrets or to learn to let go of something they’ve been holding onto for their entire life, and someone who was once good at it can forget the lessons they learned or find something they’re not willing to let go so quickly.
I don’t like feeling regretful. I feel like spending time on regrets is a waste of my current potential and being able to take positive, constructive steps in my life right now is a better response to potential lost opportunities than thinking about how they might have turned out. Despite that, it can be difficult to not look back at a few things in my life and wish that they had gone differently. My student loans are a burden. I don’t have a great relationship with most of my family. I’ve given up on relationships when there were still other options. I set my dreams aside to try to earn money quickly in order to be able to focus on my dreams.
Hindsight is 20/20 and regrets are easy. It is more difficult to remember that I had a good reason for every decision I made and that each choice seemed like it was the most beneficial at the time. I had no context for how much money my loans would wind up being. I tried harder than I should have to maintain and repair most of those relationships. Things weren’t as great as I remember them being and there were enough problems that it made sense to make a clean break rather than drag out what was probably going to be an unhappy end. I couldn’t afford to focus on my dreams and, like the proverbial frog in the pot of water, it happened one small concession at a time.
I made the best decisions I could at the time and I don’t regret doing what I thought was right. I’m sad things turned out the way they did, but the chances are good that making other choices would have resulted in something worse happening. Even if it is difficult to see sometimes, I got a lot out of the decisions I made.
I needed to get out of my home state in order to grow and learn about myself. I’m stronger now because of the independence I fostered and the friends I made in college. I didn’t really have a choice in the matter and did the best I could at the time. I’ve learned a lot about myself and what is important to me in life by addressing the current state of those relationships with my therapist. I needed to get away from a city that held nothing but sad memories for me at the time and then stay away. A clean break meant I wasn’t constantly traveling back to a place where I had started to feel stuck and stifled. I know now that my dreams are my calling and I’m more determined than ever to see them through. I had the opportunity to earn material wealth and conventional status by settling into a life of compromise and passivity, but I learned I’d rather be broke and stressed out of mind as long as I get to be creating something.
I’ve learned to process regrets and to remove them. I’m no longer as quick at it as I once was, but I can still do it. What I’m learning right now is that I don’t think I’ve ever had a regret that I didn’t want to let go. Those are a different beast entirely and something I’m not sure I’m going to be able to handle nearly as well as past regrets. I don’t really know how to let go of or process something that I still want more than I’m willing to admit to myself most of the time.
I don’t regret that it happened. I don’t regret anything in regards to how it went. What I regret is that it ended. I regret that we weren’t able to work it out. I regret that we weren’t right for each other and no amount of wishing on our part would fix it. Even working at it wasn’t enough, in the end. It was the right decision and I know it. I even feel it. I just regret that it was a decision we had to make and I probably will for a while. I need more time to process this before I’m ready to let go of this regret, but I’m certain I will eventually.
It just sucks right now. Everything sucks right now because regrets will expand to fill every hole in your time and attention. Soon, I will start to peel it away from me. Extricate it from my life. Pack it up and process it. In a week, a month, or maybe more, I will be back to feeling no regret, but I’m not going to hurry it up. Instead, I’m going to cut myself some slack, mourn the end of an important relationship, try to reclaim the parts of my life that had become about the two of us, and then prepare myself for the reformed relationship that’ll form out of this one when we’re both ready.
Someday. Eventually. Like I said, I’m not going to put myself on a timeline. I’m going to let myself regret and heal at my own pace. I owe myself that much.