“Why waste your time worrying about it?” demands nearly everyone I have ever made the mistake of confiding in. “The past is past. Nothing you can do about it now.”
This little morsel of non-insight has been dispensed to me by friends, relatives, and relative strangers for lo these interminable years of what one can only laughingly call my adult life. The purported wisdom: Don’t fret over things you can’t control. To which I say: What the hell else are you supposed to fret about? The whole point of irrational anxiety is that it’s not rational.
There are plenty of real-world applications for irrational feelings of regret, remorse, and dread. But the all-time champion has always been romantic disappointment: things done to and by you, by and to people you loved exuberantly or insufficiently; ways you failed to express or conceal that love; terrible words spoken; perfect words unspoken; mistakes, missteps, misunderstandings; conversations too long delayed; steps too soon taken; habits pampered; work neglected; and, above all, the haunting awareness of having squandered a miraculous human synchronism and not being able to viscerally remember why it seemed so necessary to bail or to be bailed on.
