Human Regret

The end of the day sometimes forces me to look back at my day with a wish that it had been different, where I should’ve acted with more purpose and joy. This regret fills my heart with a present that should’ve been instead of this sorrowful reality. These beautiful sunny days are my first in Montana in a long time where I finally feel at home, yet I’m missing people I used to have in my life and people I wished were in my life but have never been. I feel withdrawn from society when I shouldn’t be since I have so much to offer. I’m alone right now because I choose to be alone.

I need to write, and I need to read, and I need to work. I’m directing all this physical and intellectual effort toward one particular end, and that’s to be my best. I need to be my best because life is too short to live it in mediocrity. Life depends on how I spend its time, and I want to spend it working. So these brief moments of sorrow I’m suffering need to be worth it; I have to make them worth it.

Life, like any good journey, has its ups and downs. I was down for a while, but over these past two hundred and twenty-two days, I’ve pulled up my bootstraps and started climbing that mountain, and I feel like I’ve reached the top and can see the whole world of possibilities. I can lift my hand up in the air and reach for the stars because that’s all I want to do. I want to reach for the stars and do all that I’m capable of doing. It’s an insane feeling because I feel like I can do anything.

At the end of the day, though, I’m only human. As much as some people think I am, I’m not a robot. I do get tired and burnt out, and I do feel unmotivated and sad and every other emotion in the human language on some days. For example, I’m really forcing myself to write right now because I feel sad, and I don’t want to write anything. Why am I sad? Because I’m alone, mostly. I would’ve loved to spend this beautiful sunny day with someone, which made me nostalgic, which made me sad and regretful.

I wrote in my writing journal today that I should stop writing in this blog and instead use that time to work on my novel or to build up a short story portfolio. That idea sounds super appealing, but I did make a promise to write 365 entries. I’m very close to accomplishing that, and breaking it now seems ridiculous. I’m conflicted, though, and I don’t know how I want to proceed yet. I really want to improve my fiction, and I especially want to build up a portfolio of short stories for grad school. I thought of maybe cutting the word count for these entries from 500 to maybe 250 words. It’ll still be daily, but it’ll be shorter. I might move in that direction if my urge to write more fiction is stronger than my urge to keep my blog writing streak going.