“We regret the things we don’t do more than the things we do” – Mark Twain

Mark Twain was wrong or at least too general to be right.

After coming home I had nothing but time, thoughts and emotions. I was locked away in the den of the apartment as all the emotions that accumulated through years of shame and guilt began to surface.

I began to realize that I had been running from all the mistakes of my past without ever really confronting them but gently ignoring them and hiding them away. They came back with a vengeance knocking on the door of my mind. One after another, they would greet me and tell me how I completely fucked up there and then. The irony of it all was that I used to think that I was the responsible one but my mind didn’t let me off the hook that easily.

The truth is that I was the responsible one, when it came to others. It may have been the fact that I was the first of my generation and that the weight of the world was on me as if time was of the essence. Regardless of why I prioritized others over myself, I finally came to a realization that I never really prioritized myself and my goals.

Based on how I treated myself, I was woefully irresponsible.

Okay, woefully may be a bit of an exaggeration but I definitely wasn’t the kindest to myself and now I understood why. All these negative emotions such as shame and guilt were there to teach me a lesson that I wasn’t willing to listen to.

They were there to teach me what I no longer want to experience but I was such a mischievous, stubborn and ignorant kid that I didn’t listen the essence of what it meant to be truly responsible. Instead of doing what was right for myself and others, I decided to show others that I was right even when I was wrong.

Now, looking back, it seems like my whole life has been a villain arc but actuality, I was both the hero and villain. I was a hero to others and a villain to myself, sometimes. There was this ever changing need to become better and more that stemmed from a place of lack. I was in a rush to become the man that I only dreamed of becoming. The problem was I didn’t know who that would be. I just knew that I didn’t want to be where I was or be me and therein lies the problem.

If I didn’t want to be me or where I was than almost everything about me was wrong and the people around me were wrong. While this may not have been entirely false, it created a sense of urgency but also a lot of friction and conflict. I wanted to be better but didn’t want to do the work for it or know where to begin. At the same time, this mindset that I adopted was inherently unhealthy.

We should aim to do things that we can be proud of sharing and we should also aim to be a person that we are proud of being, if that makes sense.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t entirely proud of anything I was doing and I wasn’t proud of my being. I had bought in and been sold the idea that the western media perpetuated only to realize now that none of it was really for me yet I decided to tough it out, which was entirely the wrong way to go about it. I had been out of place and out of line, most of the time.

I guess the upside of this is that now I know what I don’t like, don’t want and don’t want to become but the golden nugget of wisdom is that was should be emotionally intelligent enough to understand and interpret our emotions. There is no way around it and if we try to outsmart or go around it, we inevitably end up making the same decisions and going through the same pain. Shame and guilt are there to tell us that we are or were going the wrong way or doing the wrong thing. It is up to us on whether we want to listen and I am here to say that I listened so that I can say goodbye to them. It’s time to look to being proud of who we are and doing things that make us proud of who we are for ourselves.

For me and for now, that’s to be normal at some things, above average in others and exceptional in a few.