My only regret was too young for Lisa Bonet, my only regret was too young for Nia Long.
,,,
My only regret was too young for Sade Adu, my only regret could never take Aaliyah home.
No Role Modelz – J. Cole
If someone were to ask me right now what I'm most afraid of I'd say regret... and her triplet cousins – could've, should've and would've.
Jeff Bezos has often advised to live one's life with a regret minimization framework, which is fancy speak for 'live your life in a way that you'd have the least number of regrets when you look back'.
I was recently doing a retrospective on all the things I wish I could change or undo but can't – and I came up with the following list... my mini-catalogue of regrets:
I. I wish I was firm enough to cut certain people off when it became evident that even though they had some good in them, my association with them had an overall net negative outcome and sometimes, would simply boil down to something toxic – I guess I cared too much about how they'd feel if I abruptly cut them off; I was way too empathetic.
II. I wish my relationship with Anne went differently.
III. This one is the most recent and the most bothersome to me right now – I wish I hadn't lost my temper one morning when my baby sister said something annoying that I easily could have ignored but didn't – it had nothing to do with her, I simply woke up on the wrong side of the bed and I let the frustrations of life get to me. I needed to let it out, but instead of finding a punching bag or taking a long walk (this is how I usually defuse anger), I let it out on her..." You know she was your best friend ..." my mom kept telling me, even months after it happened.
I haven't been able to live with what I did and even though I know she has forgiven me and moved on from it, it hasn't been the same since then.
J. Cole might still get lucky with Lisa Bonet, Nia Long and Sade Adu...but there's not much he can do about Aaliyah (RIP) – Anne (remember Anne?) is still alive but there's not much, or anything at all, I can do about her either.
I wish I had met Anne after and not before Jay, when I had become a better person; it aches me whenever I think of how I treated her sometimes, she is a great person through and through and I'll always give her 11 out of 10 points on the scale of human being. She was sweet, it was ingrained in her very DNA and she never bothered that the world we live in will often use this against you; If I could wave a wand and make things different, I would correct all the mistakes I made with her...because I'm much better now, I really am.
If I could say this to her I would, but knowing her, she would probably be thinking "Dude, what's the point to all this, it really doesn't matter now" – I get it, I pushed her to that point where she feels nothing, not hate, not even indifference...just nothing.
All I can say is I regret my missteps and I'm sorry.
The last thing I want is to make Anne a footnote in someone else's story but the truth is that I can tell Jay's story without saying all this about Anne - she made me a better person by enduring all my BS and I just can't write all of this without saying it...I need the world to know. I'd like her to know that I'm sorry for the petty, mean and the borderline heartless things; she deserved a lot better than me and I hope she gets him soon if she hasn't already. She obviously doesn't know this but at the beginning of every year I look for her to check that she's doing great...and as at my last check, she is.
