Thinking about Regrets

My family and I, and many of my friends and relatives, have just celebrated the High Holidays, when those of us of the Jewish faith look back on the past year, count our blessings, evaluate our shortcomings, ask for forgiveness—personally—from those we have harmed, and—communally—from God for the sins committed “knowingly and unknowingly” by all of us. And each year, sometime during this time of self-reflection, I pause because the word “regret”—a powerful word—comes to me. What are my regrets as I look back on the years before?

This past July I had the privilege of talking with a class of college students embarking hopefully on careers as writers. I was introduced as a “Late-in-Life” author, whose second novel was soon to be published after a first, surprisingly successful, book.

I told an abbreviated version of my life story to this group of eager writers. How I had always wanted to be a writer. How I took writing classes in high school and college, drafted stories and sent them out, finally wrote two novels, one of which “almost” got published. By that time I was married, with children, and had a busy and successful career as a social worker. And for a time I gave up writing.

There was a long silence. “How come you took it up again?” one student finally asked.

I took a deep breath, remembering. “I was sitting in a circle in a personal development workshop that social workers are prone to attend,” I said. “The leader asked us to write the inscription we wanted to see on our tombstones. I was paralyzed. I knew what I wanted to say, but I couldn’t force myself to put down, in black and white, the words—Here Lies a Writer—describing the dream I had given up. I started to cry.

With much coaxing from the group leader I finally admitted that I was afraid I would die without ever achieving the dream I had of being a writer. I think I was experiencing premature regret and that epiphany made me realize that unless I did something about it, I would have to live with the despair of regret for my whole life, and I would indeed die without ever achieving my dream.

So no, I didn’t give up being a mother or my social work …a job I loved. Instead, over about 15 years, I took classes and workshops in writing, joined writers groups, wrote stories and sent them out, publishing more and more. The stories would become a novel and, in retirement, I found a new job: finishing my first book, “How to Make a Life.”

“Did you regret giving up writing all those years before?” another student asked? “What you could have been?”

I thought long and hard about my answer to that question. The truth is, of course, there were regrets—there often are about the path not taken. But what I also knew was that I never could have written that first novel, with its rich descriptions of family dynamics, intergenerational trauma and mental illness without my maturity and my years as a social worker. That pause in my writing career served me well.

And this is what I told those young, eager students: The way to your goals in life are most often not a straight line. But, as my husband says, “Looking back, the path is clear.”