Regret Is Not The End Of Your Story—It’s The Beginning Of Your Comeback

Life is full of people who get it right on the first try.

The high school sweethearts who celebrate their 60th wedding anniversary surrounded by their grandchildren. The piano prodigies who were reading sheet music before they could spell their own names. The investors who got in and out at exactly the right time and then retired like pirates on private yachts.

But for the rest of us, the ones who don’t magically fall into the right place at the right time, to find the right relationship, vocation, career, or financial windfall by sheer luck or fate or karma, life can feel like a mountain of regrets that just never seems to stop piling up.

The dreams we gave up because we were told they were impractical. The relationships we gave up on because our pride got in the way, or we were too immature to know how to really communicate. The jobs we wish we had, and the jobs we hated but showed up to anyway because we don’t think we had any other choice. The money we spent that turned into the debt we racked up.

Crushing defeats, great and small, that decimated our confidence one chip at a time, and left us feeling stranded and shipwrecked, floating aimlessly in the tempest of our own lives.

But what no one ever tells you is that you can pick up the pen and keep writing your own story.

The last thing you said in anger doesn’t have to be the end of a relationship. You can apologize. You can open up and be soft and vulnerable and stop pretending that you don’t have flaws or make mistakes. You can say, “I’d like the chance to try this again,” and the right person will be willing improve along with you. You don’t have to let your last heartbreak tarnish the feeling of falling in love again. Your past does not confine your present or your future to any box you don’t want to be stuck in.

You can have a do-over. Or two. Or five. Or eleven. You can sign up for the class or the league or the experience you didn’t get right the first time. You can still play basketball even if you didn’t make it into the NBA. You can finish all of the readings you skipped in college. There is still time to learn how to play the drums. Life is not a train you miss and that’s it—too late, no second chances. It’s a bus stop, and there is always, always another opportunity on its way. Maybe not on time, or even every twenty minutes, but if you look for it, you will find it.

Not everything has to be a competition or guarded by gate-keepers. We can’t all be the supreme rulers of the universe, but everyone can write a poem. And no one needs to judge or critique it, put a price or a grade on it. It can just be. It can just exist in this world for you and your own enjoyment, and anyone who tries to tell you different is selling something, or has something they need to work out in therapy.

Because money is a means to an end—to security, freedom, enjoyment, showing someone you love them, life experiences, or knowledge, but we treat it like a game, just a number that is supposed to go up and up in an account we never touch, and that number is supposed to give us satisfaction or say something about who we are or give us purpose, and it doesn’t. It never does. And it never will. Because the things we want most in life can’t be quantified. You can’t put a price on a sunset, or a conversation with a grandparent. You can’t charge for the feeling of being alive or overcoming fear or following your gut.

It doesn’t matter how old you are, how many times you’ve already tried, or if you have never tried at all. The regret you are feeling is trying to tell you something, trying to will your body into action, into a personal transformation. It’s easy, to lean into the shame or the fear or the embarrassment, and let those negative experiences prevent you from taking a chance, because who would want to feel like that over and over again. But the time things go differently? The time you get it right? The time you prove everyone wrong, but most importantly, prove yourself right?

That is what is waiting for you on the other side of regret. That is the comeback you can make if you choose to be brave enough to try.