On Coming to Terms

So.

I did something today that I regretted. At least, I think I regretted it. I'm trying to climb out of the regret, which forces me to justify the actions, which requires me to think that what I did was not, in fact, regrettable. I suppose this is what people means by "coming to terms".

I remember reading somewhere, just this week, that disappointment is the gap between expectation and reality. I thought that was a very astute definition (one that made me map my life in the form of a Venn diagram), so I'd like to coin a similar definition. Regret is the intersection of desire and restriction.

The definition about disappointment is sort of an internal vs external thing - parts of it are outside of your control. Regrets, on the other hand, are purely your own: at one time in your life, you've determined that you will not do something, and yet now you find yourself having done it. You broke your own rules.

My way of coming to terms this time is to tell myself that the rule was self-imposed, and thus void. It means nothing outside of myself. It still made me feel bad, because even though I chose to adopt the rule, it was adopted from an external source, and thus possesses some authority. Here I attempted to argue with myself that externality does not necessarily entail legitimacy. This piece of logic worked for some time, but it's fleeting.

Then I tried telling myself that people change, and part of growing up is to change and break the restrictions, self-imposed or otherwise. This made me feel better a bit. I don't know how exactly am I changing for the better just because I broke a rule, but surely I'm - as they say - pushing the boundaries, which is a good thing?

I don't know yet.

Somebody told me not to worry about it. I was actually offended, because the person took it so nonchalantly, that I didn't believe he understood the gravity of the situation. Then he said part of being an adult is to recognize the consequences of your actions. I thought that was a very good point, which led me to analyze the second ingredient: my own act of breaking the rule. Yes, I did it, and I suppose as I chose to do it, I should have known that consequences may occur, even if only in the form of a very big regret. In fact, this should have been extremely clear to me in the beginning. Did I honestly think that my decisions don't have consequences?

Actually, I may have thought that. I guess I've always thought that if an action has regrettable consequences, then it must not be worth doing. I've always hated regret, and it's much easier to protect yourself against it by setting up a bunch of barriers. I thought that if I ever regret an action, then it must be because I did something wrong. Is it possible that regret is a normal feeling, and does not necessarily mean you've made a mistake?

There's plenty of people urging you not to have regrets, or claim that they had none. I like to think I've had none too, actually, but I wonder now if I can really put myself as part of that group. I've had basically no regrets because I've lived my life very carefully, and the whole point of living for me is to avoid regret. Whereas these people, they may have grown up with restrictions, and at some points break them, propelling them to all different directions. They have had to suffer the consequences of their actions, they sucked it up, lived through it, then chose not to worry about it anymore. I wonder sometimes if they chose to live without regret because otherwise they would have just spent the rest of their lives worrying about what they've done, and what bad thing possibly is coming their way because of it. That's certainly a reassuring fact - you choose to have no regrets because otherwise you will never stop regretting.

Not only is that reassuring, it also implies that a whole bunch of people are trying to talk their way out of worrying (I wonder if this means regret = worry?). This tells me that (a) I'm not alone in trying to talk myself out of it, and (b) worry and regret must be a mighty useless thing to do, if so many people are avoiding them.

So there.

I guess I should stop worrying.