Regret

I live with a great deal of regret. I’m not sure what to do about it. Worse, I’m not sure that I’m not doing things now that I’ll live to regret. I think in addition to turning my life around and living more confidently, I need to learn to put my past behind me, and to stop seeing the decisions that I made as being as bad as I think they were.

I had been bullied relentlessly all through middle school, and I had learned to think very poorly of myself. I lost my childhood best friend when he decided that he was more popular than me and didn’t want to hang out with me, and by then I just couldn’t make new friends because I hated myself and didn’t think that anyone would want to be my friend. I was in a small school in a small town so it was hard to socialize outside of the people that were tormenting me. At the same time, my parents were telling me that there wasn’t much to see out there, anyways. My mother didn’t have any friends outside of work either, and spent most of her time watching soaps on TV. My father didn’t want much to do with the family and spent most of his time at work on night time shifts and at home sleeping through the day.

At any rate, in middle school (grades 7-9 in Canada), I was made to think of myself as nothing much at all. I wanted to go out and do things, but the idea of asking someone else to hang out with me seemed scary because I was certain I would be rejected. No one really wanted to be my friend, after all. So I was isolated and spent most of my time outside school at home. I wonder sometimes what happened to those two who bullied me so much. That bullying defined the arc of my life for 15 years. I just thought differently – the very way I would think about things changed – after they got through with me. I’d like to think that I could have pulled myself up by my bootstraps and shaken it off, but I wasn’t even aware that I had changed. That’s what was so insidious about it – how can you change back if you aren’t even aware that you changed? I lost all of my confidence in myself. I became unreasonably self-conscious. I stopped doing things for the sheer selfish pleasure of doing them – it was more important that I not become vulnerable to criticism and ridicule. If I had had someone, a concerned parent or someone, anyone, who could have woken me up, maybe things would have been different, but I didn’t have anyone to help me. For 15 years I tried to live my life as something less than a man – because in my mind I wasn’t a man. I was a failure as a human being.

At the same time, my father was looking for new thrills outside his marriage and managed to hook up with a stalker. She would call us at all hours of the day and leave weird messages on our answering machine about her abortions and other strangeness, she would visit our house and throw rocks at our windows, she tried to run us off the road in her car when we went out, and there was plenty of craziness that went even beyond that. Needless to say, my parents’ marriage came to a screeching halt and my mother, after years of enduring my father’s countless affairs, filed for a divorce.

This was about when I dropped out of high school. I think I had about 2 months until graduation, but I was having a nervous breakdown. No one cared. I was attending so little school by then, and skipping so many classes, that the school administrators were happy to be rid of me. From then on, I spent about 4 years in my mom’s basement using my computer. Yes, four years. I had scarcely any contact with anyone else other than my mom and my brother. I don’t know why they let me go on for so long isolating myself. Apparently my mom had asked someone (I want to think that it was a clinical psychologist, but I suspect that it was probably a priest) about me and they counseled patience – they said that I would come out of seclusion when I was ready. Four years later, I had a dream that chilled my blood and woke me up in more ways than one.