Regrets Come Easy

I don't consider myself a depressed person, or someone who suffers from depression or mental illness as a rule.  I do think, however, that all of us suffer with bouts of depression from time to time, whether our chemicals are imbalanced or not.  And a lot of it has to do with some repressed regret about your life, in my completely unprofessional/unlicensed opinion.   I'm a firm believer that if you have navigated your whole life truly with no regrets and always happy go lucky, you're either lying to yourself or doing something wrong. 

The people who live by a "No Regrets" rule are feeding themselves a crock of shit soup if you want my honest opinion.  To be for real - you truly can manage to navigate your life without feeling regret for one thing or another?  I have regrets from when I was, like, 9.   No one has the presence of mind to decide on a regret-free life at any early enough age to actually make it happen.

So while we can all do everything possible to live a "regret-free life" after we have done many things worthy of regretting that perhaps we just don't want to admit to ourselves were regretful, despicable ideas, certainly I'm not the only one who has a whole slew of memories from my younger years that I wish I could forget.  Because these memories, not the more recent ones from years of bad decision-making in my 'should have known better years', are the ones that genuinely make me cringe.  These are the memories that visit me in the dark of night and keep me from falling asleep for the sadness I feel after I relive them.   They probably seem really trivial to anyone else, including the people that I believe I hurt, but I feel genuine angst for my younger self, who couldn't have known any better.  

One such memory - I was young, I don't know how old, and I had gotten my ears pierced.  They mildly hurt, and I had to keep twisting those little gold studs to keep the holes from getting infected.  I was scared to take the studs out of my ears, but the time had come where it was safe to take them out and replace them with cute earrings.  I was too embarrased to tell my mom that I was scared, so when she came home from a special trip to the store to buy me cute new earrings, instead of being excited and happy which is surely what she was expecting I cried and locked myself in the bathroom (or clost? memory is fuzzy).  She tried and tried to get me to come out and change my earrings but I stayed in there forever, refusing to come out.  I dont' even remenber if I changed out the earrings afterwards.  What I regret is that my mom did somethign really nice for me and I didn't appreciate it at all, and I feel bad that she was probably excited to come home and show me the present she bought for me and instead she was met with a screaming, crying little brat. 

So this is the sort of thing that keeps me up at night - not the normal regret like being angry about sleeping with some guy or missing out on a great promotion.