Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien
This would be a lot more dangerous if I was any less cautious by instinct.
I have no regrets. And I mean that. Sure, there are the little things like: maybe I should’ve asked for 2 orders of fried rice at lunch on Thursday instead of 1, and maybe I shouldn’t have been so eager with the electric bike so I wouldn’t have cuts on my leg, but those are relatively insignificant, and do I really regret them? No.
Now, there are several reasons I think I’ve gotten away without feeling regret. The first being my notoriously bad memory and/or repression of any truly upsetting events. The second could be my lack of emotional retention. The third, and the focus of this post, is the fact that I don’t believe in embarrassment.
I don’t know when I decided that this was my guiding principle, but the basis of it has been around for a while.
When I was a younger, I was, like many other preteens, very preoccupied with the idea of coming off as cool and collected. But who was I kidding, I infamously stood on the toilet lid for a full hour last year in the middle of the night because I saw a cockroach on the bathroom floor and I was too terrified to move. For me, smooth and nonchalant was always out of the picture.
Luckily, I realized this pretty quickly. The first iteration in Kalina’s Quest To Think Better came in the form of “cringe is dead” or “cringe isn’t real” or something along those lines. This was at the end of eighth grade, in the dusk of my emo phase, and at the time, this was revolutionary.
Unfortunately for me, cringe is most certainly not dead. It is very much alive and I can’t control that. What I can control is how I react to it. But either way, the mantra wasn’t true, and it needed an upgrade.
The next iteration of my mindset was “it’s fine, nothing matters”. This one stuck for a while, a sort of optimistic nihilism in the face of how enormous the world and universe are, but optimistic nihilism is still nihilism, and it gets a girl down, so that version had to go. (More on that in the recent post from Leaving Behind Gray, which basically singlehandedly inspired the creation of my newsletter.)
Let me interject here by saying that I’ve been fortunate enough to escape the grip of social anxiety, so I’ve always had a base level of confidence granted by the knowledge that no one really cares what I do, and as long as I seem like I know what’s going on I can get away with a lot. The New York City attitude if you will.
But back to embarrassment. The latest version of my mindset is that something is only embarrassing if I am embarrassed by it; embarrassment is an emotion and I have control of my own emotions. Mind over matter, another guiding principle.
I guess it was inevitable that I turned out this way, after all, it’s the example my mother always set. The other night, we were at a restaurant with live performers, and my mom’s friends handed her a serving spoon to use as a microphone. Without shame, she stood up at the table and loudly sang along. My gut instinct was to be a little bit humiliated to be near her while she was making a scene, but then I decided it didn’t matter. She was having fun, her friends were having fun, the other people at the restaurant couldn’t bothered to care what we were doing.
And that’s the core of it! I don’t think embarrassment is real because if I decide to do something, it’s probably because it’s fun or even if it was not fun, my reasoning (if it existed) was definitely more compelling than the idea of overthinking my actions. To be honest, I’m not even that good at overthinking. I can’t really retain a thought for long enough to be emotionally impacted by it, much less to regret what I’ve done. It’s an outlook that is very present and future focused, and while it wasn’t really an active choice, it’s been essential in maintaining my peace of mind.
Another piece of honesty? I don’t know if I’m as incapable of feeling regret and embarrassment as it seems. There are definitely aspects of my life that spark those feelings, and my invincibility is just a work in progress. But it helps to tell myself that I can do whatever I want without worrying about regretting it in the future, because it’s enabled me to do all sorts of things this summer: getting a tattoo with a grand total of 48 hours of thought, running off a mountain to go paragliding, kayaking on the Pacific Ocean while it rains during typhoon season.
An important note: having no regrets doesn’t mean that I can’t make and recognize mistakes. It just means that I understand how those mistakes, and all of my choices in general, have helped me become the person I am, and helped to shape my life the way it is.
So anyway. I’m not saying to go out into the world and follow your every impulse, because generally that’s not a great idea. But if you take anything away from reading all this, I hope you consider following through with ideas you’ve had for a while, or making (REASONABLE!!!) choices without worrying too much about if you’ll be embarrassed later on. Most importantly, I hope you feel braver taking on the decisions of your day.
If you’ve read this far, thank you. I apologize if there’s any glaring spelling errors or if anything just doesn’t really make sense. I want this newsletter to feel like the type of conversation you have with your friends late at night when everything seems just a bit more philosophical, and because of that, I wrote this entire thing after midnight.
Speaking of late nights, Arvin requested a section of things I’ve been liking recently. I’m not organized enough to do that properly in this post, but I will say “Late Night Talking” by Harry Styles has been on loop in my head while I’ve been writing, only sharing space with “KAZINO” by BIBI and “Vegas” by Doja Cat. I’ve also been loving Locket (the widget, everyone on my Locket please continue to update), and the Try Guys Without Instructions series on YouTube.
Also, I don’t know how much I’m supposed to post on here, but I have a lot to say, so you’ll most likely hear from me soon.
I love you.
Kalina
your thoughts are lovely miss you
my fav