The movie Young Washington has been making the rounds this year, and one thing keeps coming up in the conversations around it. People walked in expecting a history lesson and walked out thinking about their own lives.
That seems to be the common surprise. Most of us figured on some powdered wigs, a few battles, maybe learning a little more about the man whose face has been on our dollar bills our whole lives. What a lot of moviegoers got instead was a powerful and poignant lesson about failure, regret, and what we do with both.
The movie takes us back to George Washington’s younger years, long before he became the man in the history books. He’s a young officer, eager to prove himself, and his first major assignment goes terribly wrong. People die, including someone he cares about, and he comes home carrying the weight of what happened.
And just when it seems like the poor man has been through enough, life hands him another helping of heartbreak. Then his mother, who isn’t exactly a hugger, says something that seems to be the line people carry out of the theater with them.
We’re paraphrasing, since it’s the kind of moment that’s hard to write down with a lump in the throat. But the message was essentially this:
Failure can become our legacy, or it can become our greatest teacher.
The rest, as they say, is history. Literally. Well, hello, life lesson. Most people just wanted to watch a movie.
It’s easy to see why that one line stands out so distinctly, because most of us have a mistake or two tucked away somewhere that we’d rather forget. And yet, somehow, we keep pulling our failures out, dusting them off, and reminding ourselves of everything we wish we’d done differently. Sometimes for years.
When regret rides shotgun
Here’s something we’ve noticed in this community, and honestly in ourselves.
Most of us are pretty good at keeping life moving. We’ve built careers, raised kids, run businesses, shown up for aging parents, handled situations that would have sent our younger selves running for the nearest exit.
We know how to get things done.
But that doesn’t mean we’ve made peace with every decision we’ve ever made. Some of us have gotten so good at moving forward that we don’t even notice the old regrets riding along with us.
Picture regret sitting in the passenger seat of the car. It doesn’t grab the steering wheel, exactly. It just has opinions about where we’re going.
And the minute something new comes along, it leans over and says, “Are you sure about this? Remember what happened last time?” Oh, yes. Thank you for bringing that up. Again.
Maybe it’s a business decision that went sideways, a job we didn’t take, or words we said in a kitchen twenty years ago that we’d give anything to take back. Maybe it’s a relationship we stayed in too long, or one we left too soon.
And for those of us who’ve been walking beside someone who’s struggling, regret can have a particular voice. “I should have seen it sooner.” “I should have said something.” “I should have been there that night.” Many of us know that voice. It rarely tells the whole story, but it sure talks like it does.
Plenty of us have caught ourselves revisiting mistakes that nobody else seems particularly interested in discussing anymore. Meanwhile, we’re over here mentally preparing our closing argument for a trial that ended years ago.
Apparently, regret didn’t get the memo.
What living with regret may be doing to us
This is the part we don’t talk about much, so let’s talk about it.
Regret that visits once in a while is just part of being a person with a memory. Regret that moves in and sets up a recliner is a different thing. When the same old scene keeps replaying, it can start to wear on us in ways we might not connect back to it.
- The 2 a.m. wake-ups.
- The second-guessing that creeps into decisions that have nothing to do with the original mistake.
- The low hum of “I don’t trust myself anymore.”
- The way we might pull back from people, or opportunities, or even from our own hopes, because some part of us decided a long time ago that we don’t get to want things.
Researchers have noticed this too. Neal Roese and his colleagues surveyed a nationally representative group of adults back in 2009 and found that regret we keep replaying tends to travel with anxiety and low mood. Not the regret itself, mind you. The replaying of the mistakes that caused it.
That distinction matters, because it tells us where the work is. The goal was never to stop feeling regret. The goal may simply be to stop playing the rerun.
Maybe regret has something to tell us
Now, we don’t believe regret is necessarily a bad thing. We know. After everything we just said about that annoying passenger, it might seem odd to defend it. But hear us out.
When we regret something, it’s often because that experience mattered. We cared deeply about the outcome. Maybe we disappointed someone we loved, or acted in a way that didn’t reflect the person we wanted to be.
Regret can help us recognize what we value, where we might need to grow, and what we’d like to do differently next time around. There’s real wisdom in that, even when the lesson comes wrapped in a memory we’d prefer to leave unopened.
The trouble comes when we keep replaying the experience long after we’ve learned what we needed to learn. That’s when regret starts acting less like a teacher and more like a ghost.
A good teacher helps us understand what happened, hands us something useful, and eventually sends us on our way.
A ghost has absolutely no respect for boundaries. It moves in, rearranges the furniture, and makes an appearance at two in the morning when we’re trying to sleep. And somehow, we get used to having it around. Some of us may even be setting an extra place for it at dinner.
What if we gave regret a different job?
Here’s an idea that has helped more than a few of us look at old mistakes a little differently. What if we stopped giving regret so much authority over the stories we tell ourselves?
Think about how often an old experience becomes the opening line of a new possibility.
- “I’d love to start something new, but you know what happened with the last one.”
- “I’ve thought about reaching out to my brother again, but after what I said…”
- “I’d like to try, but I’m not sure I can handle another disappointment.”
Before we’ve even had a chance to explore what might be possible, we’ve invited the past to explain why it probably won’t work. And the past, bless its heart, is always happy to offer an opinion. Maybe it’s time for a little management restructuring.
We can keep the lessons without letting those experiences narrate every new chapter. One way to think about it: give regret a new job title. Instead of the narrator of our story, regret becomes a consultant.
A consultant brings experience to the table. We can ask questions, consider the advice, and appreciate the perspective. But at the end of the meeting, we get to make the decision. And if the consultant keeps repeating the same story from 2017, we’re allowed to thank it for its input and move on with the agenda.
Washington’s early failure didn’t disappear from his story. By every account he carried it the rest of his life. But he picked himself up, faced more challenges, made more decisions, and grew into the leader we remember today. The experience became part of what shaped him.
There may be something worth considering in that for all of us.
We’re not the same people we were back then
There’s another piece of this that we find especially interesting. Sometimes the fear we carry into a new opportunity belongs to a much older version of ourselves.
Maybe we tried something ten years ago and it didn’t work. We were disappointed, embarrassed, or hurt, and we promised ourselves we’d never go through that again.
Fair enough. At the time, that may have felt like a perfectly reasonable decision. But look at everything that’s happened since. We’ve gained experience. We’ve learned to spot things we might have missed before. We’ve picked up new skills, built relationships, survived things we didn’t see coming, and discovered strengths we didn’t know we had.
Yet when a similar opportunity shows up, we sometimes respond as though we’re still the person who went through that original experience. It’s like pulling an old winter coat out of the back of the closet, squeezing into it, and wondering why the sleeves ride up. We’ve grown. That’s allowed.
One of the most useful questions we can ask ourselves might be this:
“Am I making this decision based on who I am today, or who I was when things went wrong?”
Because those two people may have very different answers. The person we are today has the benefit of everything we’ve learned along the way, including the lessons that came from the things we wish had turned out differently. And wouldn’t it be a shame to do all that growing only to keep deciding as though none of it happened?
Three simple ways to stop letting the past make our decisions
So how do we begin loosening regret’s grip? We don’t think it takes an elaborate process, a forty-seven-page workbook, or a full renovation of our emotional haunted house. Sometimes a small shift in how we look at an old experience can help us find our footing again.
Here are three places many of us have found a good start.
- Ask what the experience taught us. Rather than replaying every detail of what went wrong, we can try to name the lesson in one plain sentence. Maybe it’s, “I learned to trust my gut sooner.” Or, “I learned that saying yes to everything eventually means saying no to something important.” Perhaps it’s, “I learned to ask for help before I’m completely underwater.” We can acknowledge that an experience was painful while also recognizing that something useful came from it. Once the lesson has a sentence, it has a job, and we can start putting it to work today.
- Separate what happened from who we are. This one can be tricky, especially for those of us who hold ourselves to high standards. There’s a big difference between saying, “I made a poor decision,” and deciding, “I’m someone who makes poor decisions.” One describes an experience. The other turns that experience into an identity. Repeat the second kind often enough and we may start treating it as fact. It can help to pay attention to the words we use about ourselves, especially when we’re remembering something we’re not proud of. We can take responsibility for our choices without making one chapter the definition of the whole book.
- Give ourselves permission to try again, starting small. Sometimes we imagine that moving past a failure means jumping right back into the very thing that scared us. Who says? If a venture didn’t work out, maybe the next step is exploring one small idea rather than launching a whole new company. If a relationship ended painfully, perhaps we begin by accepting an invitation to coffee rather than deciding whether we’re ready for anything serious. If we’ve been meaning to call the friend we lost touch with, maybe we start with a text. One page. One conversation. One small decision. Confidence tends to grow through experience, and the smaller steps give us a chance to discover just how much we’ve changed.
One honest word before we go ghost hunting
If regret has gotten heavy enough that it’s hard to get out of bed, hard to sleep, or hard to see a way forward, a new perspective isn’t the first move. Reaching out is. A doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line (in the U.S., call or text 988) can do more for us in one conversation than any blog post. Reaching for that care isn’t a failure. It might be the most empowering thing we do.
If we’re loving someone who’s carrying a heavy regret, we probably can’t argue them out of it. What we can do is sit beside them while they carry it, and remind them, gently and more than once, that one chapter isn’t the whole book. And we can keep an eye on our own “I should have” voice while we’re at it. It gets loud in the hallway sometimes.
And if we’re simply someone who cares about living with a healthier heart and mind, with a few old ghosts and no crisis in sight, wonderful. That’s most of us, most days. The porch light question is for us too.
Don’t let the ghosts of the past spook away today’s gifts
With Halloween just around the corner, it feels about right that we call these old memories the ghosts of our past. Some of them really do have a way of showing up when we least expect them.
We can be having a perfectly lovely day, minding our own business, when an old memory wanders in and starts rattling its chains. And there we go, questioning ourselves all over again.
Here’s what we believe at Standing Tall, and we’ll keep saying it: there’s more in each of us than any circumstance, situation, or condition. That includes the circumstances we wish we’d handled differently, the decisions we’d love to revisit, and the chances we didn’t recognize until they were gone. Our mistakes are part of our story. We can learn from them without letting them decide what happens next.
It’s worth coming back to that moment in Young Washington and the choice his mother placed in front of him. Will failure become our legacy, or will we let it become one of our greatest teachers? Most of us probably have a little of both in our stories. And maybe that’s okay.
We don’t have to pretend the past was perfect, and we certainly don’t have to keep punishing ourselves because it wasn’t. We can take what we’ve learned, appreciate the people we’ve become, and give ourselves permission to see what else might be possible.
As for those old ghosts? If they’ve taught us what we needed to know, perhaps it’s time to stop leaving the porch light on for them. We’ve got lives to live.
If something in this piece stirred up an old ghost of your own, we’d love to hear about it. Tell us below: what’s one lesson an old mistake taught you that you’re still using today?
And if you’re in a place to help someone else turn the porch light off, that’s exactly what this community is built for. An hour of your time, a donation, or simply your attention helps put treatment, support, and hope within reach for someone who’s still sitting up with their ghosts at 2 a.m.
Because the past has already had its turn. Let’s give the future a say.
With love and hope,
Colleen and The Standing Tall Igniting Hope Team
