You Don't Need To Tear Away

[Do you believe people who say they have no regrets?]

[I want to, because they seem so together. Not for them the paralysis of "coulda woulda shoulda." Heartbreak in your recent past? Fine. It happened, it's over, moving on. Carrying that much baggage puts a serious crimp in your outfit's line, they seem to say; drop it, and spring freely forward.]

[But I don't believe it. Or if it's true, it's much worse. Not for a minute do I recommend my way, which is to carry shit around until it festers, grows out of all proportion, and begins to clog every system. But my thought right now is that people who claim not to be haunted by the past are either in denial, or never invest too much in anything in the first place.]

[Denial I can understand. I know it well, because it's in some ways correlative to having Issues apres la deluge. These people whistle in dark: everything's fine, pay no attention to these scars. They may be saying it to other people, and may even have convinced themselves, but it becomes fairly obvious fairly quickly that it simply isn't true. It's not kind to fiddle with the houses of cards these people have built; the crash usually isn't worth the satisfaction of getting to the truth, even if one does enjoy the occasional bit of Schadenfreude.]

[Worse, I think, are the people who really don't care about an event that to an outside observer ought to have been traumatic. One wonders how heartbreak, or what should have been heartbreak, can leave no mark. An answer (I'm willing to believe there's more than one) is that there was no heartbreak. One can't be affected by the loss of nothing: easy come, easy go. They were never that emotionally invested in the situation anyway, so its end comes, if anything, as a relief.]

[My problem is that I doubt that these people will ever emotionally invest in anything, in anyone. In me, if we want to get down to it (though there's no one right now in my life like this, at least no one from whom I need anything). The implication seems to be that when the course gets bumpy (and it always does), the "no regrets" type will be outta here before there's an opportunity for regret.]

[I'm sick of letting the past, both good and bad, be such a drag on my progress. But it's never going to go away, not entirely, and I don't think it should. Besides the absolutely true Wieselian imprecation about forgetting the past, what has happened is what makes me who I am. The present is a flicker, over in a millisecond. There's no way to know if the future even will happen, and there's a good chance a lot of it is going to suck.]

[The past, including pride in what I did right and regret at what I didn't, is all there is. I don't want to pretend it doesn't matter.]

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