Worst mistake you ever made - regrets ?

[Kay286]

What’s the worse mistake you ever made ? Or things you would go back and change and in life ?
I’ll go first ! I met a guy on holiday when I was 19 , supposed to be a holiday fling only … I ended up moving 400 miles away from my parents to be near him. Pregnant 7 months later and he turned out to be a absolute waster and an alcoholic narcissist.
I got out when my daughter was 3 and as it turned out my life has shaped up pretty amazing !!….. but boy if I could have a word with my 19 year old self I would ! It’s meant I’ve spent my whole life not living close to my mum and I’ve made peace with it now but it does make me sad. I also constantly feel guilty I gave my daughter such a shit father which had a horrible impact on her life for a long time.

I met my husband when she was 3 and he is an amazing dad to her and we have a great life now so I do wonder if it’s destiny but I was so silly !

@herewegoroundthebastardbush

WTAF are you going on about?

I said this woman (DD's friend,) FEELS she abandoned her parents, when they needed her, and she turned down offers to see them time and time again and never picked up the phone to them... Her parents never made her feel bad. SHE feels it, and cries every day about it, seeing as they are now gone. I also never said it was her fault his father killed himself. I just said she never bothered with them, and now feels bad for it.

You are projecting massively with how badly you have taken my post.

Clearly I have hit a raw nerve with you, and unearthed some feelings of guilt and remorse in you that you haven't dealt with yet. I suggest you speak to someone about how you are feeling.

*Also never said it was her fault HER father killed himself!

Not realising our friend was seriously going down a hole with depression. We knew he was depressed, and knew he was upset about losing a relationship. But he had lost several relationships and been depressed before and in the past we always arranged to see him when we were off work and pulled him through.

We did the same this time, and arranged to see him on the Friday....he killed himself Thursday evening.

Giving my "slot" to visit my terminally ill sister in hospital to my twat brother. Stupid covid regulations in 2022 only allowed one visitor, I was meant to see her but my much absent brother turned up and declared he had to go that day as my Dad was off work and could drive him. So I let him use my slot and my sister died that night. I hadn't seen her since Xmas and she died late January (very suddenly, we only found out she had cancer a couple of days before and that she was terminal already). My brother then refused to come to her funeral and sent us all abusive text messages on the morning of, and during the funeral.

I try not to regret things but I was the last person to see my brother alive before he killed himself and I think about that often.

Being so focused on needing a relationship in my twenties and early thirties, it was all consuming .. I wish I had just concentrated on me, getting established, travelling, finding a fab career.

Some of these are so sad

Sending lots of love

My big one would be wasting 3 years on an abuser when I was under 18

But I made so many right choices and now don't dwell on the regrets

been a total spendthrift in my younger years and wasted my inheritance on various crappy pursuits, including a very bad acrimonious divorce - solicitors, accusations, courts, the whole shebang. That money could have really been useful now ))

You did nothing wrong. You had no choice but to put up a boundary to protect your little girl. That makes you a great mum. You continued to help your mum at a distance, you didn’t abandon her. You are not responsible for her complex illness or her tragic death.

Not realising that I could have studied to become a librarian - I loved helping in the school library at Secondary school, and looking back, I think that being a librarian would have been my perfect career.

@SDTGisAnEvilWolefGenius you made the right choice. I took a librarianship qualification but the sector (always precarious) imploded in the late 1990s/early 2000s and never recovered. More broadly, those of us with artistic or literary inclinations struggle to monetise our talents. Payment seems to be optional at best in the arts. 🙄

Same here . It was an Art qualification but about halfway through I realised only a handful of us had the talent to make it . I want one of them . I only did the course because I thought it was the only thing I could do . I lacked the confidence to leave .

While I’m about it - I won’t file these under lifelong regrets, but things I’d do differently.

Soon after my first BF (from uni) and I got together, his conversation started to change and get very formulaic and ‘catchphrase-y’. Instead of chatting freely like we had been doing, he started to parrot jokes and call me cliched pet names. It was very boring and I wish I’d spotted the warning signs.

We did split up for other reasons, but there were a good few years afterwards of emotional involvement and I wish I’d found the courage to move out of halls in my final year. I might have had a clean break and a better degree. I might even have stayed up north and established myself in a career instead of floundering back home. Who knows?

This made me so happy.

Getting into a car when I was sixteen with an older pissed up boyfriend, who then crashed the car, sending me hurtling through the windowscreen ( no seatbelt ) which left my face looking like a map of the underground.
Now with added wrinkles, it looks like a crumpled map of the underground.

Think is so sad 😞
You only get one life; don't waste yours. Find a way to leave and create your own peace and happiness.

They're your war wounds; you're here, and self-harming was part of your journey & surviving whatever you had to. Just be you. If you aren't hiding anything, most people won't go there.

Oh god, this. Then he cheated on me, I finally saw the light and dumped him. Best thing ever but I wasted over 20 years on the emotionally abuse bastard.

Mine is less “a bad thing happened to me” and more “I was a bad person”.

I cheated on my long-term bf in my 20s with a married man with children. My bf was a good man who loved me, and I betrayed him. I’m just glad he’s met somebody else now and is happy, I think.

I loved the married guy, and he loved me too, but we’re not together, of course! He’s still with his family, and I’m glad they worked things out. I always knew he wouldn’t leave his children, but I had an affair with him anyway, and ruined my bf’s life, the man’s wife’s life, and my own life.

I’m finally with somebody else now, and we have a baby, so I’m much luckier than I deserve.

I’ll always regret what I did to my ex and how much I hurt him. He didn’t deserve it.

Me and my brother regret not being more vocal about my narcisisstic uncle's controlling and cohersive behaviour towards our lovely grandad in the years before he died. My uncle deliberately caused family rifts to ensure that my grandad left everything to him but this called great pain and sadness for my grandad as my uncle cut him off from the family and stopped us from visiting regularly. He made is seem like it's because he cared about my grandad, but it always sat uneasily with us grandchildren which we tentatively voiced a few times.

It culminated with our uncle lying to us about our grandad being in hospital for weeks before he died as he was worried we would convince him to change him will, when the least of our concerns was his money.

It horrifies me to this day that my grandad died alone thinking that his children and grandchildren didn't care. My grandad was a lovely man who deserved much more in his final hours.

Same here.

Some of these are so awful,
it makes me realise that despite what problems I perceive I have, I am
actually very lucky and grateful for it.

The only regret I suppose I have is training to be a teacher during the last of the labour years and spending the last 13 years teaching under a Tory government. I feel utterly broken as a person because of it and have missed out on so much family time and memories! But, this is something I can and am fixing so will hopefully be a distant memory very soon.

One, marrying my second husband. From when ds was 10 months old I had his mental health nurses telling me to leave. 23 years later he was arrested. I have children with him and they are amazing.
Two. In my twenties I slept with my best friend. We’d been friends for ten years or more, got up to all sorts together, holidays, parties, him climbing the balcony at five in the morning. We were one another’s back up plan, you know, divorced or widowed at sixty we’d live together.
It ruined the friendship, and he’s dead blow. I’m 64 and miss him, it hurts.
I taught my children that it’s easier to replace a lover than a really good friend.

Dead now!

I’ve got two, the combination of which would probably out me to anyone who owes me.
The first was dropping out of a prestigious degree at a prestigious university because I was too proud and stubborn to ask for help. I really needed a massive kick up the arse, but nobody had the guts to do it. It took my finances and confidence a good ten years to recover.

The second was selling my share of our house to my ex for tens of thousands less than it was worth out of guilt for leaving him. I still can’t bear to think about the loss in too much detail.

But you know what
It is easy to say this now

And SO hard at the time

So you probably did as best you could

That’s a kind thing to say, @thisisasurvivor, but I was fundamentally lazy, I didn’t do even close to my best. I was just too old to do as I was told, and too young to understand the consequences.