Do you ever wish you could go back to a time in your past and do it over?  Make different choices, respond to a situation differently, shake your younger self violently until you smartened up?  I try not to live in the past but I am ALWAYS going over conversations I had in the recent or distant past and coming up with a smarter or wittier or more confident or more caring remark.  I don’t think I tend to put my foot in my mouth too often.  But I always feel that I could have done better.  I worry way too much about what people think when, really, they probably have not given that conversation a second thought. 

When I think back to my high school days I just cringe, remembering how hard I tried to be the “good girl”.  Having been told that a Christian must stand out (I had that “in the world, not OF the world” SO ingrained in my head) I tried too hard to stick out as one who “didn’t do” just about everything and pretended that I didn’t care.  But when I look back at that time I am ashamed of what a poor friend I was.  I am ashamed that it was more important to me that my friends not swear or smoke or drink or that they knew that I was “not into that” that I missed many chances to just be with them and enjoy their company and care for them when they had bad days.  I knew some really great people in high school.  I am not now, nor have I ever been, one to have a lot of friends and hang out in big crowds and party all night long.  But I had a circle of friends who were smart and had goals and cared about people and (mostly) made good choices.  They did some of the typical high school stuff.  But they were good kids and they have grown into some really wonderful adults.

I regret that I was so busy judging and hiding behind the legalism of my religion to really be vulnerable with these people.  Or even just to have a good time.  Although my religious views have changed dramatically in the past ten years I think my values have remained largely the same (ok, a little bit the same).  But I feel like now I have a better grasp of how to be my own person without feeling that everyone around me must share my worldview, or at least pretend to when in my presence.  At this point in my life I absolutely hate it when people feel they have to be fake around me and I wince when I realize that I probably made a lot of my friends feel that they had to do exactly that.  There are a couple of people who I can only hope remember that I was trying, in my awkward, teenage way to be a friend. 

I suspect many of us would like to have a conversation with our teenage selves and try to impart some wisdom.  I’m going to attempt to teach my kids that confidence is not a steamroller that takes down everyone in its path. Confidence is quieter and much more flexible.  Like a bicycle that can change it’s course much more quickly and hugs corners and darts in and out to avoid collision. Does that make any sense? I know most teenagers are so self-involved as they try to figure out how they fit in the world and what they want from it and for it that they have little time or comprehension for this kind of subtlety.  I know I didn’t.  But I can hope that my kids will do better than I did. 

“May of us crucify ourselves between two thieves - regret for the past and fear of the future.” -Fulton Oursler

Words that describe me.  I will try and let go of the mistakes of the past so that I can try and do better in the future.  And when I do not always succeed in the future I will take solace in the words of Oscar Wilde who said “One’s real life is often the life one does not lead.”