regret
verb (used with object), re·gret·ted, re·gret·ting.

1. to feel sorrow or remorse for (an act, fault, disappointment, etc.)
2. to think of with a sense of loss

synonyms: grieve, sorrow, mourn, bemoan, bewail, lament, deplore
antonyms: rejoice

In a world where not many people take responsibility for things, it’s interesting to me that the word “regret” is typically associated with your own personal regrets. Things you have done that you wish you hadn’t. It took me quite a few search results to find a definition that didn’t overtly link it to your own self.

For the most part, the things that other people have done to me have scarred me far more than anything I’ve done or wish I hadn’t done. I regret those things a lot more. And to me that goes much deeper, because the more time you have to look back at, the more time there is to see how different individual events shaped you in ways you didn’t realise at the time.

I remember having an exit interview from a job once. The HR person was generally pretty condescending to me, which I’m used to because I looked a lot younger than I was. But there were so many times during that interview where she shook her head in disbelief and said, “They shouldn’t have done that.” “That shouldn’t have happened.”

And it surprised me. It was almost like therapy, except kind of better because this person’s job wasn’t to cheer me up. It was to state facts, and how things should have happened within the law and within a healthy working environment.

I felt validated, which was rarely something I felt at that time in my life. Because I was surrounded by people who told me I was wrong, that my ideas were only important enough to be taken and used by them. I was often treated like a child, or laughed at, or dismissed. And as their careers and pay and lives improved off the back of my ideas and hard work, mine did not.

This is not a story about how I regretted not speaking out. Because I tried. I tried really, really hard. Over and over again. But the wall in front of me was something I could never overcome, because things were twisted to suit other people’s narratives. And I’ll be honest, it very nearly broke me.

Kudos to the people who played those games, because they were exceptionally good at it. I’m not a stupid person, but sometimes you don’t see the games people are playing until it’s too late. Sometimes you protect people as a way of protecting yourself, because what they did was so shocking you can’t be near that place without being scared you’ll be dragged back in. I’m not normally a person who lets things go, but I learned that sometimes you just have to.

I’m a big believer in going back to laugh in the places you’ve cried. This, of course, isn’t always the right thing to do, but you have to follow your gut to make the decision on that.

I’m also a big believer in showing and proving, which a job never enabled me to do, because it was all about the telling. All about the show. Even now, I distrust employees who go overboard with the small talk and offers of drinks and the showmanship, the playing-the-game politics. Instead I see instead the lack of work done after 3pm, the time and energy focused on what type of coffee to choose next, that there’s more effort put into an excuse about why something hadn’t been done when it would have just been quicker to do the task in the first place. (Thankfully our team now is amazing and doesn’t do any of those things).

I’m even past that stage of that, because I don’t feel like I have to prove anything to anyone. Which is incredibly freeing, honestly. I guess I didn’t realise before that I was like an eager puppy who kept getting the door slammed in their face.

And even though my day to day is chaotic, it’s really important to me that I make time to listen and care. I’m not one of those “I suffered, so should you” people. For me it’s all about seeing what people are interested in, what they value, and giving them as much time to do that as possible. Opportunities are not for one person to hoard; everyone should have something. I don’t believe in stuffing people into boxes for my own convenience, or playing people as pawns.

I’m ending this post by saying that in the same way you don’t always realise how bad a situation is or how badly it’s affected you until after the fact, realising that is the first step to being free from it. I’ve moved on from so many things that affected me deeply, and even though I have regrets that other people acted in the way they did, they no longer hold me back. I’m free.

Today I encourage you to free yourself from something, or appreciate that you’ve unlocked the freedom you deserve. Take it, and fly.