Greatest Regret

I just had occasion to come across a particular video on the Youwebs, a video in which an aspiring filmmaker set up a camera on an Irish street and asked passerby to share with him their greatest regrets.

Naturally, after learning the question (it takes about two and a half minutes of pussyfooting around before the audience hears what he's asking), I wondered what my answer would be if asked that by a random film crew. Or anyone in general, I suppose.

The answer is, I guess, nothing.

I mean, it's not like I haven't screwed up. I completely have. I regret the time I spent in high school mooning after a girl I had no chance with; I regret not putting more effort into my college applications, and I regret that I didn't find a journalism internship at American U. I've got plenty of things that I did wrong, but all of them go into who I am today.

A woman that I love dearly used to ask me, if I could do one thing over from my college career to date, what would I choose? I was never able to come up with a satisfactory answer, but I think this concept was what I was trying to spit out:

I am the sum of my successes and my failures, and the person I am today would never have come about if I hadn't screwed up sometime in the past (in a dozen different ways). Did I make mistakes? Sure. But those are an integral part of who I am. I learned from them, I grew because of them, and in my own way I'm proud of them. I don't regret that.