With Regret

Alms Park - Cincinnati, Ohio 2018

Until recently I believed I lived a life without regrets. Not that I didn’t make mistakes or decisions that later seemed like a wrong turn, but that I didn’t hold onto any bad feeling about it. I accepted it and let it go.

But the truth is, I have regrets and some of them linger longer. I now believe it’s not possible to fully live without regrets. In life we have to keep moving, keep going - and sometimes in that effort, things happen that we wish hadn’t.

Recently my marriage ended. It’s something I’ve read on paper and is recorded in legal terms but not something I’ve completely processed or fully accepted in my heart yet. One thing I know is that on December 20th, 2025, I signed the legal paperwork to end what has been the most important relationship of my life so far. And within five minutes I was filled with deep regret.

Not necessarily about the divorce decision (or the ‘D’ word as a friend called it), although I definitely regretted that this is where things landed in the end, even though it also seemed like the right step.

The regrets went further back than that. It was like by signing that piece of paper, it unlocked this bigger view of the past 13 years and I could see more clearly all of the ways we’d fucked up. Exact moments and situations I wished I would have handled differently, exact moments and situations I wished he would have handled differently. The ways I’d let my husband down, the way I’d let myself down. I wished so badly that it physically hurt, that we could have been better to and for each other.

And the truth is, I have to live with that. And, at some point, I have to try to let it go.

I also believe there are bigger things than regret - things like love and hope. And that’s probably how we continue to move through the day-to-day.

I guess like a lot of things in life, how we handle regret is probably key. Sometimes regret stops us in our tracks and that’s OK. But we can also acknowledge it, and in some ways honor it, and still try to move forward.

In yoga we practice non-attachment and I find this hard, and at rare times freeing. One of the ideas of yoga is that by letting go of attachment to how things could/should be and being with what actually is - we can free ourselves. By letting go of outcomes, which we often can’t fully control anyway, we can find some peace.

For most of my life, I’ve been SO attached. I’m like an octopus, attaching my suction tentacles to people and ideas that I love. I think I probably still am that way but I have had moments of letting go and being with what is and it does feel like freedom.

Something else that is true is that we can release at any time. We don’t have to hold on forever. Releasing regret probably feels something like forgiveness - maybe they are the same.

“A useful gift all love’s practitioners can give is the offering of forgiveness. It not only allows us to move away from blame, from seeing others as the cause of our sustained lovelessness, but it enables us to experience agency, to know we can be responsible for giving and finding love … We know how to give ourselves love and to recognize the love that is all around us. Much of the anger and rage we feel about emotional lack is released when we forgive ourselves and others. Forgiveness opens us up and prepares us to receive love. It prepares the way for us to give wholeheartedly.”

― bell hooks in All About Love

“It is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy. We can’t tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.”

― Matt Haig in The Midnight Library