The Things You Didn't Do
I don't usually dwell on my regrets. There's certainly plenty enough of them. But Sarah convinced me to give it a try:
This sounds like a downer, but it’s actually kind of fun. There are the obvious ones that stand out at first, but it’s the careful combing of your life’s back stairs that makes this interesting. The main rule is your regret can’t be an undoing. Think of the Mark Twain quote, “Twenty years from now, you’ll regret the things you didn’t do, rather than the things you did.” If you ignore this rule, this game quickly deteriorates into My Life’s Bad Romantic Decisions, or Why Did I Ever Say/Do/Ingest That, which I suppose are both valid games, but not nearly as fun.
So, in no particular order:
- Never doing the Ledyard Challenge.
- Not writing down any of Poppa's stories so I could remember them better after he was gone.
- Never riding on the back of Ben's motorcycle.
- Not learning how to successfully side-part my hair until age 22.
- Never won the state championship in academic bowl even though we had all the knowledge and we made it to the finals and my dad even drove up to watch.
- All those times I stayed inside on the computer instead of going out with friends, age 13-22.
- Never using my newspaper column to speak out against the archaic invite-only
drinkingsocial clubs at my public high school. - Pretty much everything and anything about age 14.
- Never kissing E.V., even though he's Out now and probably wouldn't want to anymore.
- Never crowd-surfing back when I listened to all that hard rock and punk.
- Letting my dad sell our river property and the muddin' Jeep.
- Us c&g girls never getting our tattoos.
- Letting my shyness or introversion or awkwardness or whatever get in the way of telling people how much I really care about them (this applies to almost everyone I have ever known: I probably like and respect you a whole lot more than you think, I just suck at saying so)