make a list of the things you didn’t do that perhaps most changed your life
the things I didn’t do…
I didn’t tell. I didn’t say, “we can work it out”.
I didn’t move to Seattle.
I didn’t go back.
didn’t keep the ring.
didn’t keep… it.
didn’t run out of the church.
didn’t move into my own apartment.
didn’t quit my job.
didn’t leave that day I had all my belongings packed in the car, and wanted to leave. (twice)
didn’t pick up the phone.
didn’t answer that email.
didn’t love him back.
didn’t beg.
didn’t say no.
didn’t push him off me.
didn’t lie on the stand.
didn’t put them in the car and run away.
didn’t hold a grudge.
didn’t answer questions.
didn’t respond.
didn’t try.
didn’t care…enough.
© 2026 – SoulSequel
11 responses to “things you didn’t do…”
I can sit here and dwell on all of those didn’t, trudge up all of those feelings, memories, hurts, dark rabbit holes, and pains. Or I can simply answer everything with one didn’t.
I didn’t…follow my gut.
Each and every time I should have followed my gut, but didn’t, it led me on a wild goose chase.
@fosheet that is a good point. A therapist once told me that my life went wrong every time I gave up on myself.
@fosheet a very good book I recently read by a jungian psychologist, Clarissa Pinkola Estes suggests that we mourn the paths we didn’t take. She does it with her clients on a piece of butcher paper. She places a cross at all the paths that they didn’t take. It is a way of grieving for things we may not yet have recognized we needed to grieve for.
She also suggests making a shrine of items from our childhood to learn to let the child survivor in us go.
I did not look back over my shoulder and I was not one bit sorry, as I moved forward and found new life’s adventures. I did super glue one husband’s dick to his thigh before walking out the door. He called from the hospital to tell me that the acetone the nurses used to free his dick had stung him. I was almost sorry, but decided that I was not sorry at all. He told me that I could have some of the furniture. I told him that I would take only what was right and he could have what was left. Then I came with saws and a chain saw and took the right side of every piece of furniture in the house. I left him the left sides. I threw the truck load of halved furniture in a large dumpster. I am sorry that I did not keep some of the furniture, but I wished I was a fly on the wall just to see the look on his face when he came home to see everything cut in half. On second thought, I am not sorry. Life goes on and I found new life adventures. Never look back and never be sorry.
I don’t look back on what I should have done and did not do. I never go back to “give it one more try”. Once someone hurts me, they are gone from my life. What is ahead in life will have it’s pitfalls. Life has good times and bad times. but it is all a part of life moving forwards. What is left behind in my path, is truly left behind. I may replay the memory and laugh —— because, I am not sorry for any of it. No regrets.
@ladybarbara it is possible that it could be counterproductive to look back, unless of course what we are experiencing now is a memory, too.
@Scarlett I learned to stop selecting flawed men who seem “broken” and think that I can fix them. Now, I selected a man who is not “broken” and doesn’t need to be changed. It is the difference between swimming upstream against a rushing current, —- or, relaxing and floating down a pleasant stream. I have no reason to do things that I have to look back on. I don’t make the same mistakes because I am not dealing with the same kind of man.
I didn’t come to this planet by choice…
@immortal_pirate given the choice, would you have?
@Scarlett Probably not. There are a vast number of advanced civilizations elsewhere in the cosmos, given a choice, I would have gone to one of them…
@immortal_pirate ….. But, you would take Quinn with you, if you leave, because life is chaos if that cat has to live without you.
I DID