Finding Hope in Regret
Words by Crystal Brutlag
I was seventeen when I first saw the musical RENT and I immediately fell in love with the characters and the music. It became the soundtrack for life for the rest of my senior year. In a musical filled with so many great lines, one in particular stood out to me. It’s in the song Another Day. After Mimi asks Roger to take her “Oouuut tonight!” and he tries to push her out the door, she tells him, “Forget regret, or life is yours to miss.”
I plastered these words on my Facebook profile and wrote about it countless times on LiveJournal. It became my motto and it probably came at just the right time. I was a dreamer who didn’t always follow the status quo and was starting to make decisions that people who watched me weren’t quite sure about. I had just skipped my senior prom because it didn’t seem like it was worth the time, effort, or money and in doing so I missed out on part of my “high school experience.” In the months before graduation, I decided to take a gap year between high school and college to travel to West Africa and then work. And when I started college, I avoided the Christian college that people at church were pushing me toward because I wanted to step outside of my bubble. I worked almost full-time while I attended college and lived off campus, giving up my “college experience.”
“Forget regret, or life is yours to miss.”
When I graduated, I finally stepped in line and secured a good, stable, albeit sometimes boring corporate job. That was part of my dream at the time: to work downtown. During interviews I saw the nicely dressed women riding up and down the escalators and I wanted to be one of them. Soon I joined them. I didn’t think I’d be there long, but I fell into the routine of the work. At night I’d work on my blog and my novel (my big dreams) and life was good.
Until it happened. I was offered a job that would come with a huge pay cut and would take me from the cubicle farm to a church and school. My quiet routine would be replaced with a chaotic atmosphere. I decided I wouldn’t go below a certain salary. Without even knowing what it was, they offered exactly that. After thinking, praying, and talking about it, I decided to take the leap. I walked into my boss’s cubicle with my resignation letter in hand and thought, “I wonder when I’ll regret this.”
Wait, what? “Forget regret, or life is yours to miss.” These were the words I always quoted, my motto for life, the words I considered getting tattooed because they meant that much to me. Why was regret even entering my mind?
Maybe I should have gotten that tattoo to give myself a permanent reminder.
My first year was new and exciting and exhausting. I didn’t regret it. I loved the students and most of the parents that I interacted with. But then came year two, when I realized I was not valued. Not by the students and parents—they were great--but by the people I worked for and with. I stopped writing. And then came year three, when my mindset caught up with them, and I believed I had no value. I spent each day trying to survive and wondered if it was worth it.
Finally, after a year of crying on my way into work each day, I turned in my two weeks’ notice. I had light at the end of the tunnel. I imagined myself writing again after I walked out of that building for the last time. I imagined being able to concentrate on a book to read. I thought I might become the girl I once was—the girl who dreamed big.
When I walked out of the building on that last day, I realized the light at the end of the tunnel had been a mirage. The tunnel continued.
And I finally came to my first regret: leaving my corporate position. Here I was, going back to that life, a few years behind in saving for the retirement I would need now that I was back in corporate. For someone who always dreamt of having a career she enjoyed and felt like she was making a difference in, this was devastating. I had also become a different person; someone I didn’t like. Someone who was worthless; was there even a point in my existence?
I wondered where I’d be if I hadn’t left that job. If I hadn’t lost my consistency with my blog, would it be earning an income? If I hadn’t stopped querying and writing, would I have a literary agent? In the last year I’ve seen people that were in the query trenches with me before I left that job publishing their first novels. Would I have debuted with them? These questions haunted me.
“I wonder when I’ll regret this.” I could answer this question with a list.
But.
Now I wonder, “Will I always regret this?”
Because here’s the thing: I learned a lot about myself through that experience and one of the biggest takeaways is that I now know who I don’t want to be.
And after I left, instead of walking back into a corporate job I fell into a creative position that I really love. It’s a scary thing to write, as though putting it into words will scare it away. Even though I’ve done it for a few years I feel like it could disappear.
But I’ve discovered that now my regret is laced with a glimmer of hope. Maybe it won’t disappear. And if it does, maybe another thing that I love will follow. When I look at the future, I see a list of maybes. And maybe, just maybe, one day I won’t have this regret.
Until/If that day comes, I still regret that decision. I can’t imagine being in that old position and I know I needed something to give me a little push out the door, but I regret the push that I took. At the same time, I recognize that if I hadn’t taken that particular leap, I might not be where I am today.
And that’s the very reason why I probably shouldn’t regret this decision. Life is an adventure and each decision we make leads us to a new place.
I’m just not quite there yet; able to “forget regret.” But I have hope that one day I will be. Until then, I’ve learned that Mimi’s statement wasn’t 100% true. I regret that decision, but I won’t miss out on the life the decision led me to.
About the Author:
Crystal Brutlag is a storyteller who lives in Minneapolis with her pup, Mina. She believes in the power of stories. She works in communications with churches and religious non-profits, and spends her free time sharing her adventures on her blog or concocting fanciful tales. When she's not doing either of those things, you can find her talking about books with her niece and nephew, researching her next travel destination, and giving her dog endless tummy rubs.