This Book Helped Me Let Go of a Major Life Regret

I was engaged. The diamond ring glittered on my left hand the night my then fiancé, the man who’d asked me to spend a life with him, have children with, build a home and a life with, called me a “cunt” and punched a door.

I tried to get away from him in every way except leaving my apartment. For some reason, that seemed like an impassable threshold for me to cross. If I left the apartment, I was leaving our relationship, so instead I just fled from room to room, holding my hand over my mouth while I sobbed so my neighbors wouldn’t hear.

But he wouldn’t let me shut a door. He wouldn’t let me be alone. He was going to make me hear what he had to say as he followed me shouting. Every time I tried to close a door, he lodged his body in the door frame and overpowered my attempts to shut it.

Eventually, I gave up, feeling so powerless and helpless that I just crawled beneath the covers and held myself until I was so spent that sleep overtook me. Of course, he slept beside me, even though this was my apartment. I couldn’t be alone, even as I slept.

I left the next day to go on a trip with friends and broke up with him from a safe distance.

Yet days later, I would let him back. I was so invested in this relationship working that I sacrifices myself to make it happen.

I’ve often thought back to that moment, one of many moments like it where I could have chosen differently: I could have left him then. I could have never married him. I could have never had two children with him.

It’s a regret I’ve carried for a long time, one that’s hard to reconcile with the fact that I have two beautiful children because of that cursed union.

Yet it’s not a regret I carry anymore, and it’s due to a book.

. . .

Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library imagines a world where a character could live through each and every one of their regrets.

Nora Seed’s life feels at a dead end. She was recently let go from her job. She’s unpartnered, friendless. Even her own brother when he visits town, doesn’t come to see her. Her mother, father, and now her cat are dead. Her life feels so much at a dead end that she decides, why not just be dead?

She takes a bunch of pills and waits for dear sweet oblivion, but what happens is far from it. Instead, she wakes up in a library and her old school librarian, Mrs. Elm.

In this library, she gets a chance.

A chance to live every single life she could have lived.

Nora slides into the lives of her other selves in other dimensions, lives where she’s a famous rockstar, a happily married wife and mother, a former Olympian swimmer, a vet tech, a glaciologist, a better cat owner, a better friend, a better sister…

She learns that she has more of an impact on those around her than she might have thought.

In her life as a famous rockstar, for example, the lifestyle was too much for her brother and he died of an overdose. In her life as a former Olympian swimmer, her father lived, but he’d had an affair on her mother and her mother later died of alcoholism.

Nora lives hundreds, if not thousands, of lives, but none of them are perfect, and all of them come with repercussions she could have never guessed.

. . .

The word “regret” comes from the Old French word regreter, which means “to lament someone’s death.”

It’s an apt definition for each of our regrets because they should remain in the land of the dead. All of those tiny deaths could lead to lives we would have never wanted to live anyway.

I can’t even imagine how my life would have ended up differently had I left my then fiancé when I “should” have.

Maybe I would have become homeless and destitute or friendless and desperately sad. Maybe I would have had a child or children with some other not-so-great person or remained childless, thus missing out altogether on the rare beauty that comes from being a parent. Maybe I would have died from some freak accident, or maybe life would have just felt not worth living, so I’d have taken matters into my own hands.

It’s very likely though that whatever path my life would have taken wouldn’t be perfect because life isn’t perfect.

I have to admit that even though I stayed with that man nearly ten years, there’s no point in regretting that I didn’t leave earlier.

I did get two beautiful children out of it. I did learn a lot of hard lessons I believe I needed to. I scraped myself back together again. I found love, real true honest-to-goodness great again, marrying again, having another child, and building a life that’s more beautiful than I could have ever imagined.

Nora tells us,

That’s the thing that this book reminded me: instead of focusing on our regrets, we should re-direct that energy back to our present. We can do something about our present unlike all of the regrets we might have, and what a beautiful opportunity that is.

—

This post was previously published on Books Are Our Superpower.

***

You Might Also Like These From The Good Men Project

Compliments Men Want to Hear More Often

Relationships Aren’t Easy, But They’re Worth It

The One Thing Men Want More Than Sex

..A Man’s Kiss Tells You Everything