Two Things that I regret doing as a teenager

We have all been in situations that we were more or less proud of. Growing up in these times rarely comes without a few bumps along the way, and sometimes we have to learn things the hard way in order for them to be forever engraved in our memory.

This doesn’t necessarily always stop us from making the same mistake twice, but sometimes, it can save us blood, sweat and tears. Here are some of the things that I regret doing in my time.

I spent almost a year crying over someone who didn’t want me

When I was in high school, I had a friend. He started out as a good friend that I slowly fell in love with. He could make me laugh until I cried, we shared a passion for discovering new music and he looked like a supermodel. That ticked all the boxes for a 17-year-old girl.

However, he had plenty of girls around him, and I was on the sidelines as moral support and pocket psychologist. I was romantically invisible to him and I ended up breaking my own heart because he didn’t want mine. I was depressed about it for a long time and spent many nights crying over him.

There are studies which show that heartbreaks can create such large fluctuation in your brain and hormones, that they can affect your body in the same way as a heart attack.

Your brain perceives your emotional pain in the same way as physical pain. Are you aware of how much energy your body uses in order to process this? No wonder how some people can’t even get out of bed when they are heartbroken.

When I look at that time, I wish that I would have reached out to others about my insecurity. I didn’t want to be seen as less than a person, so I would share my troubles or my shortcomings.

I found that believing that you can handle everything yourself, and avoid appearing imperfect to the world, it just excavates more of the pain that you’ve already been walking around with.

Another person’s inability in seeing your worth is not reflective of reality. But as with any love story, it just doesn’t always go as you imagined. It’s perfectly okay to be disappointed.

We have hopes and dreams, and when it comes to finding love and sometimes we run into some pitfalls. But there is a happy ending in most cases, you just can’t see it most of the time.

We would have been a terrible couple and even though he was a terrific person, he just wasn’t my person.

I didn’t take myself seriously in school.

This might seem general to some people, but I am speaking from my own experience. It was extremely boring for me to be at school. I mostly spent the time talking with my classmates and my thoughts flew easily because of math, geography, or whatever we had on the curriculum.

Looking back, it wasn’t because I couldn’t keep up with the others. I just couldn’t find the connection between the information that was required and the reality in which I needed to use it.

As a result, I avoided taking responsibility for my own learning for many years, and this put me behind in everything that I wanted to do in the future. I made it though. I have two educations and now, I work with something that I love. But, I could have saved many years at school if I had only seen my potential earlier.

I learned that It’s okay to admit that something isn’t interesting. You may well find another way, or accept that being within the education system is not necessarily your way of life. I have done that now, but I wish I could have seen earlier that there are many ways that lead to Rome.

If you were to look back on your life, do you have any episodes that pop up? What have you done that you regret and how did you learn from it?