Regret: The "All or Nothing" Method

Regret: The “All or Nothing Method”

         You complained and tortured and held your ground long enough for someone to give in and leave you alone. Now what? You are alone that's what. The person is gone and you are now realizing that the very thing you were fighting for was the opposite of what you actually wanted. Love. Instead of confessing that you wanted more of this person you lied. You pushed them away, mentally convincing yourself and the other that you couldn't stand them.

Why would someone do this we ask? Why do we insist on defining our own demise? I think that deep down we know that when we crave more from a person than what they are capable of giving us, we are quite vulnerable to them causing us emotional pain. Because of this awareness we try to beat them to the punch. Is this the truth though? Are we better off hurting ourselves than allowing someone else to do the job?

Now we sit, painfully, in regret. What’s done is done and what’s lost is lost. Really? This is what we tell ourselves? What an odd concept seeing how as this person either way wasn’t able to give us what we actually wanted don’t you think? Now we are only torturing ourselves make-believing that there was actually something to be lost in the first place. Ladies and gentleman, love is a mess and we are completely capable of fooling ourselves blind.

The only truths I have ever come to know of love is first, that when it is real it is rare but forever, second, when it’s fake it is too often, and third, that when it’s absent it is the only thing we ever search for. But when we don’t confess it, it may never be known and this is the risk we are taking for our silence and when we confess something else entirely to shield us from rejection we always suffer.

The loss then may not be the love that we now convince ourselves that could have been, but something else entirely. Strength. The strength that we gain being hurt by love is a virtue, irreplaceable by any lie you dished out in its’ place and by choosing to avoid the risk we short changed ourselves. Even knowing, feeling, that a person isn’t capable of loving us isn’t reason enough to fool yourself into pretending that you don’t love them. If our emotions aren’t for expressing then for what?

For our own selfish reasons, we should then, say it like it is and put ourselves out there instead of the alternative. Lets face it, the pain of someone not wanting you in return was there to begin with, it was why we started lying in the first place remember? Let go. Your love will never be their love and it’s not something to be ashamed of. Just remember the third truth: if you crave it that means it is absent. No amount of pushing (or pulling for that matter) is going to change this.

So trust in your own love and don’t try to fool yourself or others because I promise you that the first truth, once you have it, will wash away all the stinging of the searches before it. Demanding all or nothing of someone who doesn’t share your feelings is wrong and in the end you will loose the only bit of them you ever had. 

This is my regret and if I could go back and change it, take the blow of rejection head on instead of pretending I didn’t love I really would. A thousand times over. Where there should have only been a piece broken there is now an empty spot where I myself, threw something away that can never be regained. For this feeling… I am more sorry than you’ll ever know.