Regret or Survival?

You cannot change the past, so what can you do instead?

Originally published by request for Trans Regretters. While I don’t tend to use the word “regret” to describe my retrospective thoughts on transition. I feel like “regret” is a framing that can lead to useless or harmful rumination. This essay is about survival.

I recently made a bad joke at a friend’s expense and instead of it coming off as teasing humor, it struck like a hammer. I was trying to be playful, but instead I caused hurt. Now, the memory keeps rising unbidden and it makes my cheeks flush with mortification. However, more profound regrets often stem from pivotal life choices, not just embarrassing moments.

Regret is harder to understand when it’s been tightly wound around deeper and more difficult life experiences, especially related to choices we make during our formative years. As teenagers we are subjected to all types of novel and exciting ideas. We explore them, we play with them, and we try them on like outfits. Some of these ideas outrage our parents, and that makes them even more appealing.

Throughout adolescence we have a belief that we’re the captains of our ships. It’s difficult for us to notice how impressionable we are and how we are moved to emulate our peers. We reject accusations that we’re conforming to a group or being influenced by peer pressure. In truth, even as adults we’re not immune from adapting views and attitudes from our friends and associates. We humans are social creatures; it’s in our nature.

Looking backwards, the choices we’ve made during this stage of our life seem surreal. Our accumulated experience and wisdom can leave us akin to strangers to our younger selves. We are bereft of explanations when called to account for our decisions. It can be difficult to summon a sense of regret for events from which you’ve been alienated, even if you played a critical, causal role. Regret requires a sense of agency and participation. If you’re a victim of a disaster you will suffer agony, but if you caused the disaster you’ll know regret.

If I could change my past, would I? Perhaps I would, but I’m not sure that it would be possible. I’d still be in a broken family home with a distant father and a co-dependent mother. I’d still be socially isolated from my peers, understanding masculinity like an outsider taking notes. I’d still be searching for affirmation and community on the early Internet, vulnerable to the influences of adults who ought to have known better. What could I practically change? Was I ever aware of a juncture that could have avoided an inevitable outcome? Did I ever make a choice, or was I swept along with the flood, paddling to keep my head above turbulent waters? It’s a blur.

Those of us who underwent gender transition during adolescence may not reach for the word “regret” to describe our feelings and experiences, yet no single alternative stands out, but the one I prefer is this: survival. Rather than obsessing over things we can no longer change (even if we could), instead we should think about how we’ll endure the burden of our history. Regret cannot be resolved by rumination. We can only accept the terms of our present reality and make deliberate choices going forward.

Some survivors are caught in an orbit of certainty of having ruined their lives. The pain is real, but upon inspection this trap is the same as what lead to gender transition in the first place: the comparison of one’s own life to others. In the second case the seed is “if only I were the other sex” and in the first case the seed is “if only I hadn’t tried.” As your friends and peers are blooming into adulthood, starting families and growing their careers, you may be falling behind, flailing. The wonders you expected to enjoy from your gender transition did not manifest. Your body aches from surgical scars. It’s no wonder if you worry that something has been lost. In fact, it has.

However, life is not about perfection. Life is about experience. We all forge these experiences in different ways. Anyone who has been through gender medicalization is changed indelibly. These changes send us on a different trajectory from our peers, and thus we can feel lost or hopeless when we compare what we have with what others have. Yet choices are still before us, and we always have opportunities to make meaningful changes in our lives. For some, that will be abandoning the narratives of gender transition. For others, it might be in the transformation of those experiences. Regardless, we must empower ourselves to freely go forward instead of dragging behind us the anchor of our regrets.

The past is immutable. We can only control our thoughts and interpretations. It’s tempting to assign blame for our present degradations, especially since we’ve been let down by our therapists, our doctors, and even our friends and family. We might even blame ourselves—isn’t that the basis of regret? Yet if we want to achieve happiness, or at the least an absence of suffering, we have to actively choose to seek it. There will always be future regrets, but do not let one of them be the time you’ve spent grieving for that which can never be repaired. Give yourself permission to move on.