Regrets

I've never really regretted significant amounts of time in my life.  I've regretted certain decisions, seconds and minutes, but never really years.  I regret the past 2 years of my life.  With that said, wishing for something I can't have back  and since I'm playing in the sandbox of "What Might Have Been", I want to go back to the beginning of the past 3 years of my life.  Yes there were good times mixed in there sporadically, but overall I wish I could redo them all.  I've also never really wished to go back and relive something.  I've wanted to change it from where I stand looking back at it, but not actually go back and have to relive that time.  Now I wish I could go back, take the past 3 years of my life back and COMPLETELY redo it.

Moving to Minnesota was definitely a learning experience, and I should be grateful for that.  I am, in a way, grateful, but I could have learned so many of these things a different way.  Or I could have just listened.  I wish I would have listened to leaders who told me from my primary days to choose your friends wisely.  To be around people who lift you up and who are good influences.  I chose the complete opposite.  I chose to surround myself (and obsessively cling to) someone who belittled me, beat me down mentally and emotionally, and took the little self-confidence I had and shatter it to pieces.  I chose to sit there and be screamed at day after day, hearing some of the worst things I've ever heard in my life.  Being told I'm worthless, I'm a horrible person, that I won't amount to anything, that I will be a horrible wife and mother, that I deserve everything bad that happens to me, and that I am nothing.  I can remember so many of these days so vividly, and it brings an incredible amount of sadness and anger.  As much as I want to blame other people for dragging me down to their level and making me a worse person, I have no one to blame but myself.  I allowed all of these things to happen to me.  I could have walked away at any time, but I didn't.  I should have walked away.  I wish so badly that I was stronger.  I wish so badly that I wouldn't have put up with so many things and wouldn't have been so easily influenced.  I wish so badly that I would have made better decisions, that I would have had more confidence in who I was and am.  I wish I would have remembered that I am a child of God. I know that I am, but I don't always let it really sink in and influence my life the way it should.

I feel like Esau who sold his birthright for bread and pottage.  I gave up so many things for absolutely nothing.  Actually that's not true.  I freely gave away in essence my birthright (happiness, blessings, a sense of my true identity) for misery, for anger and hatred, and for suffering.  I want to forgive so badly, but I don't know how.  I don't know how to forgive someone who purposely hurt me on a continual basis.  I don't know how to let it go.  I try, and some days I do, but then others it comes back and fills me with hatred.  I want it to be gone.  I want to forget and never remember.  I want to forget some of the people who influenced me in a negative way, who hurt me, who said horrible things to my face and behind my back.  I want to forget it all because I'm sick of hurting and sick of letting it affect me.  I don't want to be angry and feel hatred.  I want it to be gone.

Regardless of all of this, I am grateful to know who I am.  I'm grateful for the Atonement that can heal everything, even my all of my silly pains.  I'm grateful for things I've been taught since I was a child, that are always at least in the back of my mind and the foundation of my testimony that I can always come back to and rely on.  I'm grateful for family who knows who I am, who build me up and the few friends I've found in my younger years who are still my friends now that know so much more about me and my character than any of these other people who try to hurt me.  More importantly I'm grateful for a loving and patient Heavenly Father who loves me for who I am, and can perfect me and make me the best person I can be through the Atonement.  If through all of this it brought me closer to Him and helped me learn more about the Atonement, then that is a good thing.  As my dad said, "Maybe it was the best 2 year mistake you could have ever made".