regrets

I've never been one to agree with living life with no regrets.  I know that I am against the majority on this one but I truly believe that the regrets that I have are worth regretting.  I don't deny that I wish I made different choices when it comes to certain situations.  At the same time I don't wish my life to change in any way.  Most of my regrets are not the things that would necessarily change the outcome of my life but rather have saved me some tears, time and energy. 

I regret things like hair cuts, lying to people I care about, wasting time on "friends" that I should have known were not worth my trust,  allowing ugly people to get under my skin, stressing and worrying about things that don't actually matter.  I regret these things, not the decisions I made because of these things.

I started thinking about this because I was watching The Conversation and she always asks people at the end of the chat, what they would like to tell their 14 year old selves.  It took me a few weeks but I think I would want to tell my 14 year old self to stop worrying.  Oh my, if I could had spent less time  worrying about things that just don't matter in the end I could have lifted an enormous amount of pressure from myself.  The pressures of being a teenage girl are bad enough without adding the worry of what so-and-so is going to say about me when my mom won't let me stay out past 11pm.  (just kidding I think at 14 she still insisted I come home at TEN) 

Just before I met my husband I dated casually and just before that I had been in a long term relationship that ended some what badly.  We had spent most of high school together and I nearly thought my world was ending when we broke up.  Today I am able to wish him all the happiness in the world because I remember one night after we had broken up, sitting at my aunt's kitchen table and she told me that I should stop being sad and be grateful that he showed me exactly what I didn't want in a relationship.  I remember that moment changing everything.  I had such a strong sense of myself from that moment.  I knew what I wanted, what I could tolerate and what I just couldn't compromise on.  I met my husband about a year or so later.  I slipped a few times during that year and since but I always kept my aunt's advice in the back of my mind.

My husband helped me grow to the woman I am now.  I am someone that can be sensitive, bitchy, caring, cynical and incredibly aware of myself and I have been that way for a long time now.  I've never thought of myself as someone that needed to be saved.  DJ didn't save  me, he encouraged me to be the woman I wanted to be.  I don't regret the mistakes I made in getting to this point I regret the times I cried over those mistakes.  Those tears are wasted tears and I will never get them back.  Now I cry tears of joy.  Joy for the man I married and for the boy that we made together.