FAILURE: Why Regret Makes It So Hard To Move On

It feels like it should be summer and classes should be over, but there’s still a final push left to go. Everyone is stressing about exams, finishing up final projects and making summer plans. It might be daunting to think about, but failure is always lurking around the corner and can sometimes get to the best of us.

Let’s be honest – dealing with failure is hard. At times, we may need the reminder that our lives aren’t defined by these failures, but by how we react to them and move on. As humans, we immediately tend to look for where we went wrong and create scenarios about how we could have done better, running back through time with regret. Getting caught up in that cycle of determining what we could have, should have, and would have done is so dangerous because it’s hard to stop, even when we know that what happened may just have been inevitable.

Though we don’t want to accept, we are all bound to fail and that’s when it hurts most. When I look back at my most painful failures, I see myself sitting alone stuck in a rut of all-consuming regret. I often wonder, where did I go wrong? Why wasn’t I good enough? All of a sudden, the list of what I didn’t do, all the other paths I could have taken, is all so clear. Disappointment takes over as I dwell on how I couldn’t see this all before. This is the thing with regret, the self-blame for a negative outcome: it is about the past. You can’t turn back time and change what was done. You might think, if only I had prepared more or approached it “this” way, everything would have turned out better. Maybe it would have turned out perfectly, just the way you wanted it to. But, you don’t know that. All these possibilities are made from imagination. Sometimes, no matter how hard you have tried, encountering failure is unavoidable.

Regret keeps you from moving on after failure. After all, it’s hard to keep moving forward, when you keep on looking back. Writing this article, I wish I could say I have learnt to embrace failure without missing a beat. It’s so much easier to consume ourselves in self-criticism, distracting us from taking the proper steps to improve and move on from the past. Most of the time meeting failure, I feel like an absolute disappointment. And it's completely alright to feel this way. Take the time, shed a few tears, but don’t get stuck there. Instead, accept the setback and focus on the things that are in your current control. Use your regret as a boost to keep moving forwards instead of falling deeper into the cycle of “what ifs”.

So as the year ends and you possibly find yourself in this (un)fortunate situation, let yourself feel regret. Then, actively choose to accept your failure or loss and get ready for the next big thing.

Remember, failure is often inevitable.

It will happen and you don’t have to like it. Just know that you can move on from it if you don’t drown yourself in what never came to be.

by Sarah Wong '24 (Blog Subcommittee Member)