This Is How (16 page)

R
EGRET IS A HOLLOW
thing.

Regret is the lost and found of life. You can go there and sit and be one half of something that belongs to something else that isn’t there anymore. You can wait and wait and wait and wish that everything, all of it, had turned out a different way. But wishing is the meal you only dreamed you ate. In regret, you still remain so fully half, and entirely unclaimed.

Regret is the feeling at the very bottom of impossible.

Regret is like a diamond: it’s forever. Once you have entered a state of regret, you do not leave it.

It is not overbearing, like grief. Unlike grief, it does not transform into something else or get less intense over time.

Like all the other high-octane feelings—anger, jealousy, love—regret can be burned as fuel. In fact, it should be. Regret should power something beneficial.

To live in regret and change nothing else in your life is to miss the entire point.

Each thing should change you, if ever so slightly.

You can use regret to fuel learning so you do not repeat mistakes. You can use it to fuel art so that you spend a great deal of time examining regret and you come to learn its particular pain and fit yourself around it, so perhaps sometimes you hardly notice it at all. Regret can power your telescope, changing what you see.

Once you have felt regret, it has been in you and you have been in it and this does not change. It is like virginity that way.

Just as you would pull your hand away from something hot, the instinct is to withdraw but this is regret’s strength, the relentless chase it gives; and it always wins.

But there is one way to feel less regret over the things that have happened in your life.

Through gratitude and humility.

Every assault, each transgression, all of the offenses, mistakes, and horrors. Because in truth, each was utterly essential in creating the person who sits now on the other side of this page.

I am speaking now about recycling on the molecular level. I am speaking of looking at all you were given in exchange for a single mugging.

You survived. Other people who were mugged did not, but you did.

You came to understand fear. Now, if somebody you knew were assaulted, the things you said would be the things that mattered most for them to hear; your compassion becomes wider exponentially.

Consider the bounty of your dead. All the people you have
lost in your life have taught you what value is. They taught you how rare it is to breathe, how unbearably beautiful and sacred it is to feel an ache in the center of your heart.

Think of all that has happened. Each hurt has held you back in life. And now swim under the hurt and deeper, beneath the limitations these past events have imposed on you.

If you are betrayed, focus on what you learned, not how you were fooled.

If you lose your home, focus on what you want your new home to feel like.

If you fall out of love, remember the love and not the fall. If all you focus on is the fall, the fall will swallow you because it will grow. Focus is water and sunlight. It causes growth.

Recalculate all the wrongs that have been done to you and examine the benefits that happened as a result of them. Be grateful for the bad things that happened and were in some way responsible for the good things that followed.

Did you catch that
be
?

Be. Thankful.

Because this one can slip right past you so easily.

Telling
yourself you’re thankful—“No, I totally get what you’re saying and I really am grateful, you know, for a lot”—is not the same as
being
thankful. It’s not the same as
feeling
that although betrayal hurts in the rudest, most brutal way, it does leave behind highly valuable knowledge in the form of experience. What you gain is larger and more valuable for your life as a whole than what you lost to betrayal. Because each betrayal is studied by your instincts. And human instinct is ancient and reliable, utterly mysterious and possibly capable of great genius. I believe that refined, fluent instincts are a person’s most valuable asset. My own instincts have repeatedly
guided me against the grain of logic and probability. When I have trusted and followed their direction, they have never been wrong. I don’t know how or why. But I know that every significant experience—positive or negative—sharpens them and makes them more accurate.

Only by embracing all that you regret and not denying it, only by placing the highest value on what you’ve gained because of all you’ve lost, does regret lose the ability to cripple you.

It was difficult for her to speak, as though she hadn’t spoken a word for many years and things had settled in her throat—things she wished she’d said, feelings she never expressed, her worst fears.

She coughed several times and when the words finally did arrive they were soaking wet.

“My son died two months ago from alcoholism. What is almost worse for me than losing Sean, that was his name, but what was almost worse than losing him is knowing that he died alone in his apartment, drunk. The loneliness he must have felt to drink himself literally to death.” She paused here and I thought she might not continue but she did.

“When I think of it I can’t think of it for very long or I feel like I will die, too. And yet, I can’t stop going back there in my mind to his apartment to try and be with him. Even if I couldn’t have stopped him from drinking that night, I could—
I would
—have just sat there beside him and held his hand while he . . .”

This was a comment from an audience member at one of
my book signings. The bookstore had printed flyers advertising my event. They read,
SPEND A HILARIOUS EVENING WITH AUGUSTEN BURROUGHS
.

The audience was silent and in suspense. Clearly, they felt terrible for this poor woman. It was possible the audience was also just a tiny bit thrilled that I was on the stage and not them; they would not have to say a word to the woman. I would.

I was quite eager to say something to her because I had already heard the un-truth inside what she said and I knew that once I pointed to it, she would see it, too.

I couldn’t cut her off; I had to let her finish telling me. And the instant she fell silent, I asked, “Ma’am, how old was your son? How long had he been drinking?”

It was not the response she had expected, if she had expected anything. “He was twenty-five. He’d been struggling with alcohol since he was fourteen but his father and I didn’t know about it until he was eighteen.”

“Okay,” I said. “So he was an alcoholic for more than half his life. I mean, it’s not like this guy picked up a bottle one night and drank himself to death; he had a long history of heavy drinking. Right?”

All she did was nod.

“Yeah. Well, I’m very sorry you lost your son, I’m sorry he died. But I can tell you as an alcoholic myself, your son probably had a wonderful death. When you’ve been drinking that long, it takes a tremendous amount of alcohol to take you to ‘that place’ that you need to reach. And when you are there, inside of that drinking night, even if you are lonely, it is a very familiar, almost comfortable kind of lonely. And when you are that drunk, it is just impossible to explain how wonderful it can feel, the complete oblivion. I mean, there is a reason most
alcoholics will not recover. It feels good, even as it ruins your life.

“I can tell you that I have woken up with lacerations, in terrifying locations with completely unfamiliar and unappealing people; but all of it was an adventure, when I was doing it. So I think the chances are, your son was engaged in some elaborate drunk fantasy and then he passed out and that was it. It is terrible and very sad that your son didn’t want to get sober, but it is a fact that he did not because ultimately, he preferred being drunk.

“Which means, your son died doing what he loved most in the world. And I think there is no possible better death than to die while you are doing something you love above all else.”

The woman clutched the wad of tissues in her hands and brought them both to her mouth. “Oh my God,” she said.

And I thought, “Oh, fuck. She totally doesn’t understand what I said.”

Then the words escaped her as though a valve had burst and carried the words on a jet of air. “I never thought of it like that. I never did.”

“I am right about this. I almost died alone in my apartment from drinking. Your son was in the same place but then he kept going. I can also tell you, he sure as hell wouldn’t have wanted his mom sitting there holding his hand or whatever. You know? You did all you could do; you gave birth. Beyond this, it’s up to him. It really and truly is. I don’t mean to devalue the role of the parent but, speaking from my own experience, thank God parents aren’t actually a necessity.”

The thing is, you just wouldn’t think on the face of it that there was any deeper truth to be found beyond the facts as she laid them out.