Regrets, I've had a few...

Excerpts from an article about regrets:

 "Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini, and in it they argue that the born-this-way model of treating gender of trans and nonbinary patients ignores the vital role life experiences, including traumatic ones, play in shaping gender in all people. Pretending it is otherwise “sets the stage” for regret, Saketopoulou told me.

“To imagine that there was a way to live a life without regret is to sign on to a very particular understanding of human life as being interior, as being sovereign to itself, as having nothing to do with the social world, with the political world, with relationships with each other,” she told me. When it comes to gender, “there’s no way to make a mistake, and there’s no way to get it right. Meaning that you get it right enough. That’s what we’re all aiming for.”

"... It does not impoverish the value of the wonderful life I’ve led to imagine what pleasure and pain might have come from living a different one, or foreclose another, future transition, whatever that might bring. I’m lucky that I got to choose. The gift is the choice, even if I haven’t always been sure I made the right one.

."..We all know what awaits us with age, and yet it is all but impossible for any of us to fathom the transitions our selves will undergo over time. Each of those transitions is a kind of little death — the end of one way of being and the birth of another. It is no surprise that the more unexpected the transition, the more deeply unsettling it is.

"We are all hurtling, inevitably, toward that one last transition, across the one true binary, the one between life and death. And that binary is the true source of all our regrets, and our joy, too. Regret exists because we all get just one life."

LYDIA POLGREEN  

I will be thinking about this for a long time.

In the meantime, here's a poem and a picture:

AGING....     by bianca luz

You grow old, they told me, you are no longer you, you become distant, sad and lonely.

I didn't answer...

I don't get old, I get wise.

I stopped being what others like me to become, but what I like to be.

I stopped seeking the acceptance of others and accepted myself.

I have left behind the lying mirrors that deceive mercilessly.

- No, I'm not getting old.

I just become more selective with places, people, customs and ideologies.

I have let go of attachments, unnecessary pain, toxic people, sick souls and rotten hearts... bitterness and unhappiness are not for me, I release them for my health.

I'm ditching party nights for learning and embracing insomnia.

I stopped living stories and started writing them, I threw aside the imposed stereotypes.

I no longer carry eyeshadow in my bag, now I have a book that beautifies my mind.

I exchanged wine glasses for coffee cups, forgot to idealize life and started living it.

- No, I'm not getting old.

I carry freshness in my soul, innocence in my heart, and it discovers me daily.

I have in my hands the tenderness of a cocoon that, when opened, will spread its wings to other places unreachable for those who seek only the frivolity of the material.

I have that charming smile on my face when I observe the simplicity of nature.

I carry in my ears the chirping of the birds that delight me and accompany the walk.

- No, I'm not getting old.

I become selective, betting my time on the intangible, rewriting the story I've been told, rediscovering worlds, saving those old books I've forgotten half open.

I'm becoming more cautious, I've stopped the outbursts that teach me nothing, I'm learning to talk about transcendent things, I'm learning to cultivate knowledge, plant ideals and falsify my destiny.

- No, I'm not getting old.

I begin to live who I really am.~

~Bianka Luz