I’ve had a problem with regret for a long time, to the point where I do something I call “time travelling”. I get lost in thoughts for hours of reliving my life with the knowledge I have now, redoing my life with hindsight. It became a real problem for me in third year of university in 2017 when I would lose days over time travelling; wake up at 9am and the next time I looked at the clock it would be 8pm.
I’ve suffered with intrusive and invasive thoughts for a long time. If you’ve never experienced them, you’ll probably find it difficult to imagine how your own thoughts can cause so much repulsion and distress. It sometimes feels like my own mind is trying to hurt me, forcing images and concepts into my head that disgust and upset me. The time travelling was part of that. I wanted to move forwards and not get lost in the past, but I was struggling to even realise I was doing it.
These thoughts have come up again this week. I’m at a big turning point in my life, a drastic change, and my natural reaction is to fight it, to time travel back and relive my life so that I can live in a way that means I don’t have to make this change. And that’s where jealousy comes in, as I see my peers and friends achieving exactly what I wanted to achieve. I’m not normally a jealous person, but when it comes to career prospects and being recognised for hard work… I always have the thought of “why them and not me?”
It feels horrible! I want to be happy for my friends, I want to support them, I want to live without comparing my life to others’. I want my achievements to be untarnished by the achievements of others. At the moment, there’s a constant dark cloud that makes others’ successes mean that I have failed. And if only I’d done things differently, I would be able to achieve those things too, if only I’d realised and learned certain things sooner, it would be me.
Of course, I don’t know any of this is true! The only thing I should do is move forward. To do that, I need to accept the choices I’ve made. I can’t change anything, and to try to change it is to waste time.
I think that’s enough depression posting today. I’ll try to come out with a more positive post next. Thanks for reading.
- Big Sad Bill
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