Editor’s note: The Mental Health Matters column is written by a layperson, not a mental health professional.
The information is gathered from personal experiences and research. The column’ s goal is to share the perspective of a nonprofessional looking at mental health matters and point out that mental health does matter. The following is basic information to boost your mental health. For more help, please seek someone you trust and consider asking for help from a professional.
Tara O’ Toole
Special to the Citizen
I did not grow up in rural America, but that’s where I find myself now. When I grew up, it was big-city life that shaped me. However, now I get to enjoy the magic of going to the grocery store, stopping by the post office, or running a quick errand and somehow end up in a real conversation. You know, Mom. I had one of those special conversations at the post office today. I ran into someone who had already walked out the door, but quickly turned around, came back in, and stopped to talk with me at the counter. When something like this happens, that tells you something right off the bat. It’s in moments like these that you really need to take time to connect. This woman and I started talking about a mutual friend of ours who had passed away years ago. She was trying to gather information about this family friend, and before long, we were both recalling stories, laughing, and sitting with some heavier memories as well.
Somewhere in the middle of our conversation, she started sharing that she had some regrets about that time in her life. We both became quiet. Regret has a way of doing that; it slows everything down.
I shared with her that I understood because I have had regrets in my life as well. Plenty of them.
But over time, I’ve tried to look at things a little differently, and from a new perspective, you might say. Instead of holding on to these regrets that weigh me down, I try to see them as lessons that have taught me. I asked her, “Are you the same woman you were back then?” She said no.
I told her, “Neither am I.” And that’s the truth for all of us, isn’t it? We change. We grow. At least we’re supposed to. Life has a way of teaching us whether we really want it to or not. The things that happen in our past, whether they’re good, bad, or indifferent, are all part of that. We don’ t get to pretend they didn’t happen. We don’t get to erase them or rewrite them. But we also don’t have to stay stuck in them.
We have a choice. We can carry regret, or we can carry the lesson.
There are things I wish had never happened in my life. There are things I did and things I didn’t do that I wish I could go back and change. I can’ t. None of us can. However, we can be honest about it. We can say, “Yes, that happened.” We can feel the whole weight of it, we can sit with it and feel it deeply and thoroughly, and then ask ourselves what this has taught us.
This doesn’t mean that those things that we did or didn’t do in our lives were good. It doesn’t excuse them. It doesn’t make them right. It just means we’re choosing not to hold on to them, so they don’t stagnate us or hold us captive in that regrettable moment of our lives. We are not perfect. We all make mistakes. Sometimes big ones. Lifechanging. And we can spend the rest of our years replaying all those moments in our minds, wishing we hadn’t done the things we did. Or we can face them.