Category Archives: personal growth

Holding Regret

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What are your best and worst regrets? What is the difference?

If we pay attention, regret is inevitable. Living life with ‘no regrets’ is unrealistic at best, oblivious at worst. I’ve thought and written about this a lot, as evidenced by my birthday post in 2022 and the 12 (now 13) times I have tagged it subsequently.
How does regret feel? In my body it feels tight at the neck, shallow in breath. My head hangs, my lips purse. I avoid eye contact–don’t want to be seen–that’s shame, right?

“I would rather regret being too kind than not kind enough.”

I have said this for some years and now, in this moment of writing, I know why. As I realized and wrote in 2022, my worst regrets are relational–times when I have caused a rupture, especially when repair was incomplete or impossible. I could easily substitute honest, empathetic, compassionate, generous, humble, and forthright for ‘kind’. These memories still sting, and I will carry them forever. Thankfully, I pack them better now. They occupy a smaller, more condensed compartment of my life baggage, less damaging when they leak.

Holding regret well, I have learned, requires both accountability and self-compassion. Accountability makes me reflect, learn, and commit to doing better in the future. Self-compassion helps me step out of shame (I’m such a bad mom/friend/doctor/person), and stand instead in guilt (I did a bad thing). The difference: Shame seizes; guilt activates.

Brené Brown wrote yesterday on Instagram:

My research and my life have taught me that regret is one of our most powerful emotional reminders that reflection, change, and growth are necessary. In our research, regret emerged as a function of empathy. And, when used constructively, it’s a call to courage and a path toward wisdom.

The idea that regret is a fair but tough teacher can really piss people off. “No regrets” has become synonymous with daring and adventure, but I disagree. The idea of “no regrets” doesn’t mean living with courage, it means living without reflection. To live without regret is to believe we have nothing to learn, no amends to make, and no opportunity to be braver with our lives.

In our work, we find that what we regret most are our failures of courage, whether it’s the courage to be kinder, to show up, to say how we feel, to set boundaries, to be good to ourselves, to say yes to something scary. Regret has taught me that living outside my values is not tenable for me.

Regrets about not taking chances have made me braver. Regrets about shaming or blaming people I care about have made me more thoughtful.

Sometimes the most uncomfortable learning is the most powerful.

Discomfort: What actions do we take to avoid it? When does this lead to regret down the road, and which of these discomforts would we choose, if we had it to do over? Vulnerability is extremely uncomfortable–a risk of variable magnitude, depending on context. The reward, however, can be transformative. I regret causing others discomfort with my vulnerability; I’m better at attuning to that risk as I age. I regret when my vulnerability is met with dismissal, invalidation, or minimization. Still, deep human connection cannot occur without real vulnerability, risks and all. Since I live for connection, I have a very high tolerance for the discomfort of vulnerability. Expressed alongside kindness, honesty, and humility, likelihood of connection rises and regret declines. How lovely.

What regrets would you rather carry forever?

I Hold Regret for Us that shows us our core values, that keeps us honest and accountable. I also hold love, compassion, and deep connection that lightens regret’s perpetual load on us all. We walk on, my friends, all on the path, all doing our best.

Holding Wholeness

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When was the last time you judged a whole person, dismissed them, or put them on a high pedestal, knowing only one thing about them? They’re a Chinese-American doctor. They’re a black man in jail. They’re a white male CEO. Their body shape is at least as thick as it is wide. They think exactly the way you do about something really important to you. They think the opposite, and loudly.

“Mamala and the Senator”

Most of us probably know Kamala Harris more as the senator, the attorney general, and the district attorney than the maternal figure to her stepchildren, the avid home chef, and the joyful, laughing woman among friends. How do we reconcile these divergent aspects of her humanity? What does this bring up for each of us? What biases does her wholeness as a person trigger?

Some of us want to see women mainly as maternal, domestic figures. We value the feminine as nurturer and caregiver, the personal glue that holds individual family units together. Others of us also cheered when we watched Senator Harris in action, interrogating hearing witnesses with firey eye contact and direct language, not letting them deflect, obfuscate, or gaslight. Some of us cannot reconcile these divergent sides of a woman, cannot imagine their synergistic integration embodied and applied in leadership, especially at the highest level. That’s too bad, because any leader–man, woman, or otherwise–must own all parts of themselves to lead to their full potential. The strong and the soft, the masculine and the feminine, the committed and the flexible, the differentiated and the attuned–these polar and balancing aspects of our nature make us whole humans. People who live in their wholeness lead by example, by inspiration, by resonance with the wholeness of those they lead. They are leaders because we are moved to follow them; we feel their integrity and want it, aspire to it for ourselves.

Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Independent. Name a professsion. Name a state, a generation, an eye color, and all of its associations in your mind. It’s okay to think of stereotypes. The brain operates on pattern recognition and shortcut heuristics; we could not live effectively without these automatic systems in place. We just need to guard against leaning on them so heavily that we oversimplify and overgeneralize our fellow humans.

What a narrow, uninteresting, and unfulfilling life when we only see people as categories. Red, Blue, old, young, rich, poor, male, female. What happens to our heuristics when we encounter contradictions? Maybe gay people should not be conservative? Asians should not be loud and demanding? How do we react to the unexpected, the new, the unknown? Too often we fear it. It’s perceived as a threat–to our own expectations, identities, and emotional security. Fear can then sublimate to denial, anger, blame, exclusion, and violence.

What happens when we hold space for one another’s incongruous, confounding, enigmatic, vibrant, and distinctive wholeness, ourselves included? Maybe then we can say, “I don’t fully understand us, and I choose to see us–all of us–anyway, and be with the parts I don’t yet get, because the longer I’m with us, either it will get clearer or I’ll just accept what I cannot know and figure out how to live in civility, if not harmony, with the whole of us.”

None of us is defined by only one aspect of our identity. And yet we so easily identify others this way. What a disservice to one another’s full humanity. Even when it’s positive–“You’re a doctor, wow, you must be the smartest person!”–it’s still reductive. And when it’s negative–“All Trump supporters hate women and people of color”–it is destructive, no question, even when we think we protect and defend the good.

Holding wholeness means getting and staying curious. It means being honest with ourselves and holding ourselves accountable to our biases and how they manifest in thought, perception, words, action, and relationship. It means practicing self-compassion for all of this, and extending empathy and compassion to others struggling with their own self-honesty and -delusion.

May we endeavor to see one another’s full humanity in every encounter. May we withhold judgment, even for a moment, a breath. May we move through the world with an attitude of ‘together’, all of me with all of you, inextricable, interdependent, ad infinitum.

I Hold Wholeness for Us.

NaBloPoMo 2024: What I Hold for Us

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“What can I hold for you?”

Friend asked me at the end of lunch, after I had shared some hard things about life at the time. I have rarely felt quite so loved and cared for, so seen and utterly held, just in the asking.

This is my tenth consecutive annual 30 day blogging challenge. By now I have confidence that I can complete the task. The theme emerges easily and intuitively each year, always a pleasant and knowing surprise. The real challenge is to create thirty pieces that I’m proud to save and share, to not overthink, and not sacrifice sleep. Let’s go.

I had initially named this year’s theme “What I Wish for You.” That’s too passive. I do a lot more than wish things, especially the relationally meaningful and important things I intend to write about. I work for these things. So I turned onto “What I Hold for You; What I Do for Us.” But that was a bridge too far, somehow separating (elevating?) myself from people, which is not my MO.
I’m about connection in all circumstances.

Thus “What I Hold for Us.” That feels right. Holding is a gentle action, yet powerful and strong; active yet unobtrusive. It attunes and attends; it persists. It has depth and carries intention. Holding, like standing and planting, implies perseverance and resilience. This is what I want for us all, now and for the foreseeable future–we need it.

Doing this challenge in 2024 feels different from and higher stakes than in 2016 and 2020, the last two presidential election Novembers. Anxiety and tension have intensified; even the most equanimatous people I know are agitated. Conflict escalation feels inevitable; desperation and hopelessness lurk everywhere. I have ceased political activities for some years, and consume political news in the smallest possible bites. I have held that we are all humans, here doing our best every day, getting along close up even as we denigrate one another in groups from afar. We are tragically and heroically paradoxical, we humans, and I embrace it, love us for and despite it. Yet now, the week before voting closes, even I cannot escape the dread.

“‘What can I do, I am only one person?’ said seven billion people.” I can write.

This month, this year, in this season of society, we must resist the pull of toxic politics. I intend to hold this line: The line between connection and separation, between shared humanity and dehumanization. My political and policy leanings may show, and I will let them. They will always take a back seat, however, to my commitment to relationship and connection.

Six days now until who knows what. Deep breaths. We are all in this together, folks. Whoever you perceive as your enemy will not be vanquished. And it’s not about that anyway. We suffer from serious and significant differences, yes. It feels life- and liberty-threatening to people on both/all sides–existentially terrifying. Still, if we breathe deeply for a moment and look all around, the unassailable truth of collective human resilience and the potential for cooperation still shines through the cracks of rhetorical rubble. I will write from this emphatic perspective the whole month, rooted here with my entire being.

I Hold Us–All of Us.