Why I’m going to stop saying ‘I wish I’d started this when I was younger’
On regret and bitterness
One of the most useless emotions in life is bitterness. I saw it on the faces of certain family members when I was growing up, observed the pinches around their mouth, the calculation in their eyes, and the sharpness of their words, wielded like an obsidian blade to cut those around them.
As an adult, particularly after my husband died, I was very wary of bitterness. I knew how much grief, sadness and regret I held around so many things from unsaid words to certain life goals that would never materialise, and I also knew how that could harden into a cankerous nut that would sit inside my heart, and turn myself someone that was hard to love, and hard to be near.
When I was much younger, a year shy of turning 20, as I was breaking up with the first man I had fallen in love with, he said one of the best and most enduring things a man has ever uttered to me. ‘You’re an easy person to love’. I never wanted to lose that.
Even without traumatic events, I’ve come to realise that bitterness is so heavily linked to regret, that a dangerous time for it to rear its head is as we get older, particularly as we start to change things about our lifestyles or notice changes in our bodies.
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