From the Church's Shadow

I blogged before about growing up in the Church and for the most part it was a pretty positive experience.  I was fortunate to have some open-minded, progressively theological adults in my life at the time.  Unfortunately, though, these few adults weren’t enough to counter the conservative culture that was pervasive in my area and the era in which I grew up.  One loving, accepting Sunday School teacher wasn’t enough to coax me out of the closet.  Since those teenage and young adult years I have been surprised and even shocked to learn who else around me had to keep their true identity hidden for the fear of what would happen if they were discovered. 

The problem with growing up in the Church is that the Church is always at least a generation behind the culture.  For example, the “women’s liberation movement” began in the 60’s and moved through the 70’s (and still has a long way to go on many fronts).  Most mainline protestant denominations slowly welcomed women into the ranks of ordained clergy (pastors, priests).  The Methodists, Presbyterians, some Lutherans, some Baptists all began ordaining women in the later 70’s and 80’s—pretty much a generation behind women taking their place in the secular workforce among male counterparts.  But not all denominations have moved to accepting women as church leaders.  Some Lutherans, the Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and many, MANY fundamentalist denominations who adhere to a strict, contemporary interpretation of scripture divorced from original culture and context still insist women must remain silent (1 Corinthians 14.34) and that wives are inferior to their husbands (1 Corinthians 11.3) and should be obedient to their husbands (Titus 2.4-5).

The same holds true for topic of premarital sex.  It’s still scandalous in many church traditions for an engaged couple to “shack up together” before they get married and if they have a child before the priest or pastor declares them married the amount of judgment and scorn they have to endure typically drives many from the church.  I know many couples who have been told by their religious leaders that if they want to be married in this or that church they have to give up living together and remain celibate for a duration of X amount of days/months.  Why?  Because somewhere someone has found a passage or two that can be used to interpret these premarital relationships as adulterous.  Nevermind the fact that for most of history, particularly in Europe, many couples wouldn’t be married until well after the birth of grandkids, usually as they came into the last third of their lives and wanted to “make themselves right with God.”  Marriage, in their case, was something done in the senior years not when the couple began their lives together. 

And divorce, which is actually a topic Jesus of Nazareth speaks of with relatively great detail in Matthew 19, is something that the Church was fairly quick to be okay with.  Why?  Because so many high profile leaders and televangelists were getting divorces and so, to maintain their reputations (and income), they minimized Jesus teaching on divorce to suit their own needs.  And, let’s be honest, it’s easy to disregard your own sin when there’s so many other flashier sins that can attract the public’s attention and on which you can make a living. 

I pretty much grew up in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA).  I’m still a member of this denomination though over the years I will admit that I have been tempted to make a jump to other, more progressive traditions.  The ELCA, for the most part, has been a fairly forward thinking institution within the greater Church.  Its predecessor bodies (because it was formed by a merger of existing denominations in the later 80’s) began ordaining women in the early 70’s.  In 2009 the ELCA churchwide body approved the rostering of openly LGBT clergy in “committed lifelong monogamous relationships.” 

This kind of progressive mentality still hasn’t manifested itself in the region in which I grew up or currently live.  In 2009, when the churchwide body made its decision, many local congregations in my area left the ELCA because they insisted that homosexuality was a sin and they would not remain a part of a church body that would allow flagrant (and flamboyant?) sinners to be leaders in their church.  While large, progressive metro areas like San Francisco and Portland and even pockets of Kentucky and Indiana benefited from the decision, congregations fell away from the ELCA in droves in my region. 

The reason I’m giving you this history lesson and introducing you to the realities of church politics is because I’m trying to paint a picture for you.  This is the reality in which I grew up.  This is the reality in which many of us grew up.  Many of us still live in this reality.  The Church, which is so fond of making Sunday School children memorize “For God so loved the world that God gave God’s only Son…” (John 3.16) and make kids sing “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world…,” was the same Church that looked at people who were LGBT and said, “Not you.  God says you’re an abomination.  Here’s a list of passages from the Bible to prove it.”

So growing up in the 80’s, with the HIV/AIDS crisis taking hold of the media and the public imagination, homophobia was on the rise.  The one place LGBT people could have gone to be reassured of their value and their humanity systematically rejected them, declaring that there was no way God could love such wicked, unnatural people.  “God made Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve” is something many of us chuckle about today but back then it hurt.  A lot. 

LGBT people had no standing in the secular world and the Church tried very hard to take the love of God away.  Is it any wonder that mental health issues correlated with LGBT self-identification? Is it a surprise that antagonists of LGBT people would use that correlation for their own agenda, saying that LGBT orientations created mental illness rather than understanding that isolation and fear and anxiety over the reaction of friends and family and even God created mental health issues in LGBT people?

Self-denial and conformation were requirements for survival or so many of us felt.  What choice did we have?  If we came out as teenagers we would be ostracized or even physically threatened.  If we came out as teens or adults we risked losing the people who should love us unconditionally, our families.  And even God.  We were trapped.  We made choices.  We made commitments that would lock us into a trajectory that would deliver us into a future that, for the most part, would look dramatically different than the past.  For the most part.  Obviously there still remain too many exceptions to the rule and we, as a society, still have a long way to go.

For me, because of my personality and my interests and my education, as I grew older I began to understand things differently.  Within the context of the Church and the Church’s institutionalized homophobia, I eventually learned that the Church’s intolerance of LGBT people had nothing to do with God and had everything to do with narrow minded, superstitious, and even ignorant interpretations of passages from the Bible.  I’ve blogged before about a quote from Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon and the quote that has been a guide for me in my understanding of theology and Church:

“From these Christians who came to [Avalon] to escape the bigotry of their own kind I learned something, at last, of the Nazarene, the carpenter's son who had attained Godhead in his own life and preached a rule of tolerance; and so I came to see that my quarrel was never with the Christ, but with his foolish and narrow priests who mistook their own narrowness for his.”

For me and others like me, it’s an enormous gift to come to a place of understanding in which you know that God loves you for who you are, just as God made you to be.  To shake off the burden of ignorant theology and superstition is a liberating experience.  The God we sought to please by denying who we truly were is the God who lovingly welcomes us with open arms, declaring, “No matter who you are, what you’ve done, what’s been done to you—I love you.”  Seeking God’s forgiveness for something far outside of our control like our biological makeup and internal wiring is no longer a priority.

For me, however, forgiveness still needs to be sought.  And I know I’m not alone.

In an attempt to be what we were told we should be, many of us, as I said, locked ourselves into a trajectory that led us into an unimaginable future.  We boxed up our LGBT selves and put on our straight faces because we never thought in a million years that things would get better for us.  We had “traditional” marriages.  We had children.  We built a life….that didn’t belong to us.  Some of us can extract themselves from this artificial life easier than others of us.  People like me?  Our life…our lies…interconnect with the lives of others with such complexity that to extricate ourselves from these lives would be disastrous.  It’s no longer a case of hidden identity for the sake of our own protection but it has become a case of hidden identity for the sake of the protection of others.  To tug at the threads and unravel the lies would hurt too many people.  So, those of us who have been forced by the culture, by the Church, and those who love us to deny who we truly are….well, we end up continuing to deny ourselves for the sake of those whom we love. 

I celebrate the stories I hear in which LGBT people find ways to navigate out of the trap and can do so on relative good terms.  Some of us can’t do that.  Some of us are still silent.  We’re here, we’re surviving, but…not really thriving. 

So here’s the thought that keeps me up at night.  Because I’ve come to a place where I simply can’t keep silent anymore, I worry about when Troy Comets and not-Troy Comets are going to come together for the first time in front of the people I try to protect.  Because, as much as I was victimized by a culture of ignorance and a Church that should have known better, the people affected by my choice to “try to do the right thing” are real victims.  I can’t not tell my story anymore (which is why I’m blogging) and I can’t not help others tell their story. 

What happens when my ‘two selves” are forced to coexist in the lives of the people I love and who love me?

And I know I’m not alone in this. 

I have learned that forgiveness from God is easy; it flows from God’s loving nature.  I also know that forgiveness from human beings is complicated, particularly from those who feel betrayed by us even when our intentions were the best.  After all, how do you forgive someone for breaking your heart?  How do you forgive someone for threatening to not be there when you depend on them so much? 

I guess this is the shadowed reality of the LGBT community. 

Our Whole Lives Are Just Stories

I am a huge fan of the Vikings. 

Yeah.  No.  Not those Vikings.  Let me clarify.

On the History Channel there is a historical/costume drama called “The Vikings.”  It is created by the same imagination behind Showtime’s “The Tudors” and “The Borgias.”  His name is Michael Hirst and the guy knows his history.  He does a very good job at dramatizing it for public consumption.  “The Tudors,” of course, tells the story of King Henry VIII and his wives.  “The Borgias” is about Pope Alexander VI and his illegitimate and often times frightening family who served as inspiration for the modern epic “The Godfather.” 

“Vikings” is a drama that focuses on—wait for it—the Vikings, those conquering warriors from Scandinavian lands who terrorized (and to a certain extent civilized) much of Europe, especially the British Isles, around the 8^th century.   I’m a fan not just because I think Michael Hirst is a gifted story teller but because “Vikings” speaks to my heritage.  My mother’s mother was first generation born in the United States; her parents emigrated from Norway.  Of all of my ethnic backgrounds, my Norse ancestry is the least explored.  So not only am I entertained by “Vikings,” it causes me to think and gives me direction to read and research something that seems too large and unknown to know where to begin.   

I’ve started re-watching the series again in preparation for the premiere of the new season.  I often stream something in the background while I’m working and, since today is Saturday and blog writing day, I had “Vikings” going while I tried to write, back up, and start over.  Some days the blog writes itself.  Some days I can’t seem to put two sentences together without abandoning the effort and starting over a dozen times.

Guess what kind of day today was. 

And then the sky opened and the Norse gods literally smiled down on me and I knew I finally had the angle for the post I was struggling to compose. 

Season one, episode seven.  Our hero, the recently made Earl, Ragnar, has headed west again to sack British villages and towns and his imposing wife, Lagertha, a character who would score high on the Bechdel Test, is left in charge.  A married couple, who had apparently struggled for years with an inability to have children, present themselves in front of Lagertha.  Apparently the woman had given birth to a son and her husband was outraged, declaring that the child couldn’t possibly be his.  He relates to Lagertha and “the court” that a young man calling himself Rig had visited their home roughly nine months before and the husband was certain that the stranger was the father of the child.  His wife, in tears, said she didn’t know who the father of the child was.

Lagertha, who is as intelligent in court as she is deadly on a battle field, beckons the woman closer to her place on the throne.  She asks the mother, “Do you know who this Rig was?”  And, of course, the woman trivializes him by saying he was just some young man.  Lagertha continues:  “On the contrary.  We know from our ancient stories that Rig is another name for Heimdal.”  This stuns the young mother who can’t seem to get her head around the idea that this young man who had visited her could possibly be one of the Viking gods.  Lagertha says, “You are fortunate that he chose your household to appear.”

The husband isn’t having any of this.  He says, “My lady!  That’s just a story!”  and Lagertha, fixing him with a contemptuous gaze, responds, “Our whole lives are just stories.”  She continues by chastising the husband for not trusting his wife despite the joy and comfort she has brought him by delivering him a son.  Lagertha’s judgment?  “Do not punish her.  Rejoice with her.  Drink wine with her.  And sacrifice one of your animals to Heimdal the God.  But if I hear that you’ve harmed this woman, or this child, you will answer for it to me.”

Okay, so Lagertha’s judgment and warning go beyond where I could have stopped but…I just couldn’t stop myself.  Lagertha’s a badass and to stop where her words started to serve my purpose would be to ruin Lagertha’s story. 

And, since I want to talk about this idea of story, I couldn’t very well destroy this one to prove my point.

“Our whole lives are just stories.”

From the moment we are born to the day we are laid in a casket with family and friends gathered around us, celebrating our lives, we are a story.  We are the protagonist and sometimes our own worst antagonist.  Every experience we have, every struggle we meet and every success we achieve, creates the arc of our story complete with chapters and themes. 

We wear the advertisements of our story on bodies, in our social media, and even in our vocations.  These things become our book’s cover, our public readings, and the forum for encouraging from others a deeper understanding of our story and through our story a deeper understanding of the world.  This about David Sedaris telling stories from his life in his books or on “This American Life” which connect to larger themes and provoke greater thought.

We are also “storied at” throughout our lives.  The great narrative of our history surrounds us, with its shame and its victories.  Our religious traditions imbue us with yet more story.  The stories of the people in our lives—our family, our friends, our colleagues and coworkers—all bring their stories into our lives and, just as the sharing of our story with them broadens their understanding of the world, in the sharing of their stories we begin to see things differently as well. 

We can’t escape the idea of being caught up in a story or being storied by institutions, conventions, and family traditions.  Why?  Because our stories are the only thing we have to make sense of our lives.

It kind of makes me think of that scene at the end of “Men in Black 2” where Agent K shows Agent J that the world is bigger than what J believes it is.  This is how we make sense of our lives, by connecting it to larger stories outside of ourselves. 

How we hear stories and how we remember stories help us to learn and to understand.  From our oldest religions we have….stories.  From our history text books we have….stories.  From our parents and grandparents we have….stories.  From our teachers we have…stories.  To our children we give…stories. 

Think about the last conversation you had.  Maybe you were trying to explain why you chose to study what you studied in university.  Maybe you were trying to share something you thought was funny.  Maybe you were trying to help someone understand that whatever they were going through is something many people have experienced.  You can’t do any of these things without sharing your story. 

Here’s where we tend to run into trouble.

Because our world is smaller and moves faster than it ever has before we are considerably more disconnected from the “story keepers” in our lives.  Now, I’m not saying that parents and grandparents have all of the answers because they flat out don’t.  But traditionally, when the world was larger and slower, the older people in our lives were able to hold onto our communal stories—our histories, our traditions, etc.—and could place them (and us) into the context of time.  It was from their sharing that we could learn more about our place in the world.  We were more rooted as a Western people. 

Some of you might be old enough to remember “The Waltons.”  I think it’s still on TV running on Halmark channel now.  It’s a story of a multigenerational family living through the depression and World War II.  It aired during the 1970’s.  Think about the grandfather in that show:  He was always ready to share a story, to anchor his grandchildren in their history, but he absolutely never told them who they should be or what they should do with that knowledge.  That’s an ideal example of what I’m talking about with regard to the “story keepers” from the older generations. 

But that’s not the world we live in anymore—if any of us actually did live in a world in which we were fortunate enough to have a Socratic story teller like Grandpa Walton.  Instead we bump along as best we can, children of working parents and chaotic, frenetic families, learning what it means to be ourselves while being told through the stories in our music, in our friendships, through the internet, from teachers and leaders that we should be this way and we shouldn’t be that way.  We are bombarded with stories that are not our own and can’t possibly be our own and it confuses us and it distracts us from our own story. 

We used to call it “peer pressure.”  We were told by people who seemed cooler than us what we should do, how we should act, what we should wear, and so on so that we could be cool, too.  I’m sure our peers still do this but I think what we suffer from now is story confusion. We watch shows on Nick and Disney and we see people we want to be.  We want their stories.  We mimic their behaviors and copy their voices and mannerisms.  We become an echo of a fictional person because we become convinced that this person who shares our lives through the television is who and what we should be. 

And it’s not just teen programming.  Think about your favorite shows and how, even as an adult, you want to be cool or successful or liberated like your show’s hero.  Or you want to live into a romanticized life where the complications of work-a-day life are resolved by clever wit in a reasonable amount of time without a great deal of the mess that real world problems deliver to their victims. 

Now think beyond television.  Think about the music you listen to and how we adopt these stories.  In my non-Troy Comets work I have confronted a number of people over changes in their personalities because of the music that they start listening to.  “You become the music that you listen to” is repeated by me over and over in many different contexts.  We’ve all seen this happen.  Someone is introduced to “emo music” and they begin to dress and act and talk “emo.”  Someone is introduced to “country music” and all of a sudden they’re telling us about running out of beer, their girlfriend leaving them, their truck not starting, and their dog dying.

Sorry.  I couldn’t help myself.  There’s more to country music than losing alcoholic beverages and riding around in pickup trucks.

I think. 

But you get the idea, I hope.  And this really isn’t a new phenomenon.  People have done this ever since human beings learned to tell stories.  Our stories have heroes and we want to emulate those heroes.  We want to be remembered in story just like our heroes are remembered.  It happens in holy writings and it happens in secular writings.  Think about this clip from “A Christmas Carol” in which Ebenezer Scrooge talks about the comfort he received as a child from the heroes in his books. 

We have to train ourselves to keep our own stories uncluttered and untangled from the stories of the people around us, whether they are real or not or directly in our lives or not.  If we lose track of our stories we lose track of ourselves.  The confusion of our own story is one of the biggest causes of identity issues people face today.  It’s definitely tricky since we have, as a whole in the Western World, lost our traditional anchors (for better or worse, by the way) and in place of these story keepers we have, through technology, gazillions of other stories to adopt or sort through or learn from. 

I’m not sure what the solution is when it comes to story confusion.  I have ideal, textbook-based thoughts on it but we don’t live in such a black and white world anymore and I think these idyllic solutions only act to confuse our stories even more.  It’s just another voice telling another story of what we should be. 

I think the only thing I’m comfortable saying about the topic (at least right now) is this:  People need to figure out how to hold onto their own stories.  Here’s what I mean.  Since its premiere on Tuesday night, I’ve watched on social media how people have responded to the characters and the stories of “The Real O’Neals.”  The ones I enjoy the most are the ones that read like “I see so much of myself in [insert character’s name here].”  That’s healthy, wonderful, and incredibly helpful in discovering your own story.  It starts “from home” and moves outward to touch on someone else’s story.  The alternative would be “I really want to be [insert character’s name here].”  In this statement we don’t even start “from home” and immediately want to adopt a story that isn’t ours. 

I hope I haven’t made this too complicated to follow.  I am going somewhere with all of this.  Trust me.  I wouldn’t be laying all of this seemingly complicated mumbo-jumbo out there for you, dear reader, if I didn’t have a plan in mind.  But let me summarize it all for now like this:

“Our whole lives are just stories.”  We have our internal stories that help us understand ourselves and the world around us and we have our external stories that help us orient ourselves in time and place.  All of these stories live in us but are occasionally threatened by stories that aren’t ours that demand our attention and tantalize our imagination and want to usurp the stories that actually make us who we are and not a character on TV, an idea of a person from a song, or an understanding of who our heroes are.  We need to pay close attention to how other people’s stories interact with ours, how that interaction might help us tell our story or might confuse us and draw us away from our story. 

Stay tuned for part two.  

Regret

There are a lot of things I know I should like but I just can’t bring myself to liking. 

A couple of years ago I confessed to one of my aunts that I can’t make myself like The Beatles.  I feel like I’m supposed to like The Beatles.  I recognize that The Beatles are iconic because they revolutionized music.  They pushed the envelope and did things that hadn’t been done before.  The energy that they created around themselves was endemic and infectious.  Some people would argue that Beatles lyrics are some of the best lyrics ever composed.  I identify all of this and I respect all of this but I just can’t bring myself to like The Beatles. 

Here’s another example.  I love movies that are crafted well and tell character driven stories.  We don’t get to see many of these in our local theatres anymore because of how formulaic Hollywood has become; they know what sells and so they create products that sell rather than art that speaks and lives.  So, if I say that I like artistic movies and avoid the mass produced and highly predictable dross that flows from the major production companies, you would think I would like classic movies, right?  Wrong.  I can’t stand so called classic movies.  Case in point:  Every Christmas season I struggle with the people in my life that need to watch “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Miracle on 34^th Street” because these “classic” movies speak to a human condition that seems to be front and center during the holidays.  Again, I know I should like these movies and movies like them but I just can’t bring myself to actually liking them. 

Now all of that isn’t to say that I find nothing of use to me from the artists behind these mediums.  I can appreciate a moving lyric from a Beatles song or a line from a film that resonates with something inside of me.  I’ll find comfort and challenge from these things but I just can’t bring myself to be a stalwart supporter or diehard fan. 

More often than not I’ll find a better connection with the individual apart from his or her art.  John Lennon just talking off the cuff, for instance, is more likely to get a reaction from me than any carefully crafted composition. 

Well…maybe John Lennon isn’t the best example.  To be honest I can’t call to mind anything he ever said in an interview that seemed to have stuck with me.

A better example would be the Italian film maker Federico Fellini.  If you aren’t familiar with his name or his work (films like “La Dolce Vida”) you might be able to recognize him from his infiltration into popular culture.  The illustration which immediately comes to mind is the 2003 novel turned film “Under the Tuscan Sun” starring Diane Lane.  One of the characters in the film (Catherine, played by the indomitable Lindsey Duncan) was greatly influence personally and philosophically by Il Meastro.   

One of the things that film maker Fellini said apart from his work as a film maker that even makes an appearance in “Under the Tuscan Sun” is this quote:  “Regrets are a waste of time. They're the past crippling you in the present.”  I like this quote not because of what it says but because of what it made me think. 

I think this quote is an over simplification.  If Fellini was alive and working today I might try to accuse him of employing bumper sticker philosophy or selling out to the soundbite culture.  It’s a catchy comment that feels true but I think it’s actually a statement that doesn’t really consider the psychology of the word “regret” and how I think it can and should be used in our day to day lives. 

Now that I’ve accused FeFe of an oversimplification, let me make one of my own.

I think there are fundamentally two types of regret.  The first type is the regret we feel when we do or say something and almost immediately realize that that wasn’t the thing to do or say.  I remember when I was growing up and my extended family had gotten together for dinner and games and just spending time in each other’s company.  A skiing trip was being planned and I had absolutely no interest in it.  My aunts and uncles were trying to convince me to come along going so far as to point out that skiing was how my one uncle met his at-the-time-fiancee.  I immediately commented that if that was the case I definitely wasn’t interested in going.  As soon as I said it, the words I thought would be funny, rang in my ears and sliced deep into my pride.  I had shot my mouth off without even thinking.  I immediately regretted the words.

The second is the regret that we feel over something we have absolutely no control over.  It’s that thing that we did in that past, maybe born of good intentions, that unfolded in a way that we could not have predicted or foreseen, that complicated our lives and/or the lives of the people around us.  This is the regret we feel over words or actions that were said or done with the best of intentions based on the information at hand.  It’s typically the regret we feel as we grow older or information becomes more available or knowledge becomes more reliable. 

I think this is the regret we feel as a whole when we think about things like slavery and colonialism.   It’s the regret that many of us in the LGBT community feel when we look back on our lives, having made the decision to keep our identities hidden because, based on the information we had at the time, it was the only viable option.  We become trapped by those choices and the lives that we create around them.  We eventually fear the damage that could be done if we tried to correct these mistakes. 

I also think it’s this second type of regret that Fellini was referring to when he commented that regrets are the past crippling us in the present.  The first type of regret will definitely make us feel stupid and stir up feelings of remorse and shame, but I think it’s this second type of regret that can become so guilt ridden that we end up causing ourselves problems by carrying it around with us.

I believe that emotions like guilt and shame and regret, when understood properly, are important tools in our journey of becoming.  We experience emotion to tell us when something is right or wrong, joyous or frightening, off-kilter or copacetic. What is more is that it usually takes time to gain perspective and objectivity with regard to choices that create feelings of regret of both kinds.  Sure there are those moments (like the example I just gave involving my uncle and his (now) wife) when you open your mouth to realize you’ve got some toe jam stuck in your teeth but usually regret is looking at your past and realizing how stupid some of the things you’ve said and done actually are.  More importantly, regret is looking at your past and understanding why some of the things you’ve said and done probably weren’t the best choices you’ve ever made.  This understanding piece is so incredibly critical; without the understanding of why and without asking yourself questions to uncover the why you’ll never be able to learn and grow from the uncomfortable experience.  You’ll be stuck in that past and needlessly carrying the weight of that regret around with you into the future. 

Unlike Fellini seems to be indicating in his statement, I don’t believe that regrets cripple us in the present unless we let them.  If we choose not to address them, ask ourselves questions about them, and become okay with the answers we discover, we will be burdened with them.  Otherwise it’s like everything else in our lives when we gain some distance in time and are able to be objective:  We look for the patterns and themes and take those lessons forward so that we become better people. 

When you read a book, the author will typically establish certain “givens” that you have to accept to make the story move forward.  You can wonder about some of these givens, what certain characters were thinking when they made certain choices or why this fictional world works the way the author says it does but in the end, if you want to move on with the story, you have to come to accept these givens and then look at how these givens affect the story. 

It’s the same with our individual lives as we consider our own stories.  Particularly with that second form of regret that is so much more complex than the first.  When we look at our lives and the bad things that happen to us and sometimes, more importantly, the bad things that we do to ourselves, we struggle to make sense of things.  We can and we should ask ourselves why we did these things and how we ever thought they would be okay but at the end of the day we have to take our lessons and move on.  We have to accept the “given” of the event and say to ourselves, “That’s just the way it is.  I can’t change it.  So how is it going to affect my story?”

My 2016 self, with its knowledge and experience and perspective, can literally stand here and scream at my 1980’s self and my 1990’s self about decisions I made which ignored the needs of my identity but at the time, in that time with the information available to me, it was the best and only decision I could make.  Of course I know better now, as we all do, but I can’t live in a place where I am constantly berating myself for the stupidity of that decision.  I can’t live in a place where I allow the guilt and the shame of choices like these to consume me.  In the end these choices become givens in the story of my life.  I cannot allow myself to be continuously victimized by choices I made in good faith at the time that set me up for future problems.  And more than that, it’s not just about me.  The regret I feel becomes all the more poignant when I consider how those choices have affected and will affect the people around me, the people I care most about.  If I chose not to allow these choices to become givens after exploring the regret they have generated after time has passed and more knowledge is gained, I would never be allowed to move forward with my story let alone my life.  

Regrets don’t necessarily have to cripple us in our present unless we give them that much power.  With all due respect to Federico Fellini, regret is an opportunity to learn from the past to empower us in our present if we choose to ask the critical questions and incorporate even the most uncomfortable of answers into our stories.  It’s hard and sometimes painful work but knowledge, like anything of value, should never come easy.