No regrets. Just kidding — I have a lot
But these two concepts have helped me learn to live with them
If I could live my adult life over again, I’d do a lot of things differently. And I’m not talking about little things. I wouldn’t take “time off” from work to be at home with my kids. I’d take my daughter to Texas for brain surgery sooner. I probably wouldn’t change my name when I got married. I regret some pretty big decisions I’ve made. And I think about them a lot. Much more than I should in my opinion (and several other people’s, too).
Daniel Pink, the New York Times bestselling author, would have us believe that regret is a good thing. His latest book, The Power of Regret, tries to convince us that regret isn’t a negative emotion, but something we can harness for good. The subtitle is “How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward,” but looking backward gets me stuck. After all, it’s hard to move forward in a straight line when you’re constantly looking over your shoulder.
Pink has developed a framework around regret that teaches you how to use it as data so you can make better decisions. He even neatly categorizes regret into four different types, making it all seem so doable. And he offers very actionable steps you can take to get past your regret: Look inward, outward and forward; reframe your “if only” to “at least;” correct a regret with a “redo” if you can. His suggestions are interesting and helpful, but I still struggle with the couldas, shouldas and wouldas of my life.
But two concepts are helping me get past my past and what I did or didn’t do there.
The first is from the classic book, “Gifts from the Sea” by Anne Morrow Lindbergh (yes, that Lindbergh). Much of the book, which was first published in 1955, didn’t appeal to me, but I found her thinking around middle age fascinating. Lindbergh writes that middle age is often tragically misunderstood, and that instead of thinking of it as the “afternoon” of life, we should look at it as a kind of second adolescence:
[In middle age] the signs that presage growth, so similar, it seems to me, to those in early adolescence: discontent, restlessness, doubt, despair, longing, are interpreted falsely as signs of decay. In youth one does not as often misinterpret the signs, one accepts them, quite rightly, as growing pains. . . But in middle age, because of the false assumption that it is a period of decline, one interprets these lifesigns, paradoxically, as signs of approaching death. Instead of facing them, one runs away, one escapes—into depression, nervous breakdowns, drink, love affairs or frantic, thoughtless, fruitless overwork. Anything, rather than facing them. Anything, rather than stand still and learn from them.
Now look, you couldn’t pay me to revisit puberty or high school (except maybe that one semester I spent as an exchange student in Vienna). But there is something about this idea of a second adolescence that I love. As teens, it is our necessary work to push back, to make mistakes, to experiment and grow. The more I thought about it, the more I saw the parallels with midlife, and the more positively I viewed this habit of standing still to learn from my discontent, restlessness, doubt, despair, and longing, to see them as signs of growth instead of decay. LIke a prickly teenager, I’m going through a stage and I’ll eventually come out the other side.
The other concept that’s really helping me comes from Grace Bonney of Design Sponge fame. Nearly two years ago, I heard Bonney interviewed on the Everything is Fine podcast and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.
Bonney is the author of “In the Company of Women” and “Collective Wisdom,” both collections of interviews with trailblazing women. The podcast’s hosts asked Bonney about the best piece of advice she got while working on these projects. Bonney’s response: Evolution never stops.
“I will continue to change and understand and then unlearn lots of things — if I’m lucky — for a very long time,” she explained. But there’s a catch. “I need to stop doing what I’m doing, which is feeling ashamed of earlier versions of myself. If I don’t embrace those earlier versions of myself and invite them to the table with my current and future versions of myself, I can’t actually appreciate where I am in life.”
Bonney credited this advice to Mahboubeh Abbasgholizadeh, an Iranian journalist, documentary filmmaker and women’s rights activist, who is featured in “Collective Wisdom.” After multiple arrests for organizing peaceful protests, Abbasgholizadeh left Iran in 2010 and moved to Europe and then the United States. She’s managed a nonprofit media organization and taught at universities, and today she lives in Brooklyn and teaches Persian cooking classes with the League of Nations among other things.
“I think I’ve had five different lives,” said Abbasgholizadeh in her interview with Bonney. “I’ve died from one life and been born into another life in the same body.” She elaborates:
I feel like there is a table, and there are five different Mahboubehs around the table. One of them is a young revolutionary woman, one of them is an immigrant woman, one of them is a feminist, one of them is a mother, and one of them is spiritual and just wants to relax and enjoy nature. I think, What do I do with all of you? They sometimes start arguing with one another.
I feel that as I age, I make peace between all these Mahboubehs around the table. They live together, and they have peace.
I can’t stop thinking about that image.
I picture the dining room table in my home of 22 years, the home where I made a lot of the decisions I regret (as well as some I’m very proud of), the home where so many different versions of me have lived. I imagine sitting around that table with all the Kates and making peace, forgiving them for the things they regret and showing them some compassion.
“You made the best decision you could with the information you had at the time,” I tell the 30-something Kate who left her gig as a contributing writer at a national magazine to be a full-time mom. “Sure, those doctors in Texas were doing the surgery that changed your daughter’s life for nearly a decade before you spoke to them,” I tell 49-year-old Kate. “But that doesn’t mean she would have been a good candidate way back then.”
The image of sitting with my former selves is so liberating — even quite lovely. When I imagine it, I actually feel proud of those Kates instead of embarrassed by them. I see them for their strengths and accomplishments instead of their weaknesses and mistakes. It’s a conversation I want to join, a dinner party I wouldn’t mind attending.
I’m not going to pretend I’ll never lose sleep over my regrets again — I’m evolving, not becoming a different person. And I’m hardly as comfortable with my past as Taylor Swift, who grossed $1B celebrating all of her eras this summer. But I’ll keep returning to these two ideas — the concept of middle age as a second adolescence and the idea of sitting around a table, making peace with all the different versions of myself — to keep them in perspective.
It’s helping me, and I hope it helps you, too.
I have also had second thoughts about my decision to change my name when I got married, among other what ifs. This was a helpful perspective!