When I was in third grade I had these two best friends. We were in the same class and we did everything together, ate lunch, studied, practiced witchcraft at recess, everything. We were a little weird, no doubt, but for the most part harmlessly so. Then this one day, close to Valentine’s Day, my two friends, we’ll call them Erin and Jane, came up with an idea. We would write fake love letters to this one boy in our class, we’ll call him Dan. We all knew, even at that young age, that Dan was different from the other boys. He was, in as much as an 8-year-old can be, gregarious and slightly effeminate. We didn’t necessarily think he was gay specifically, but there was just something about Dan that made the idea of him getting love letters from a girl seem out of place. I didn’t particularly want to do it. Dan was a nice boy and he’d always been kind to me. And, having spent plenty of time on the receiving end of it, I didn’t like being mean or making fun of people. It wasn’t my thing. But I liked being part of my little best friend clique, and I didn’t want to go against the group. So, we wrote these silly, exaggerated love letters the content of which I have very little recollection. And we snuck them into Dan’s cubby. Later that day our teacher, we’ll call her Mrs. Brown, saw the letters, recognized Erin’s and Jane’s handwriting, and dragged the two into the hall. Mrs. Brown was not a yeller, but that day she started screaming at them before the big, heavy wooden door had closed all the way. The tone in her voice is something I’ll carry with me for the rest of my life. The rage, she was so angry, sad, disgusted. She was horrified. I was horrified too. I didn’t completely know why, but I knew we had done something bad, something mean. Mean enough to get Mrs. Brown’s voice to sound that like. An eternity later they all came back in from the hall, Erin and Jane looking like they’d seen a ghost and possibly also been hit by a truck. They had to write apology letters to Dan. Mrs. Brown sat back down in her rocking chair and I promptly fell apart. I began bawling uncontrollably and collapsed into her arms. She hugged me and tried to comfort me which only made it worse. I confessed that I too had written one of the notes. I was so sorry. So. Sorry.

I’m 43 years old and I remember that day like it was yesterday. I remember my reluctance to write the note, doing it anyway, the look of embarrassment and shame on Dan’s face through the whole ordeal, the gravel in Mrs. Brown’s voice as she berated my friends. But mostly I remember the guilt. The guilt of being the one who didn’t get caught for sure. But mostly the guilt of being one of them. There was something about not getting caught that gave me perspective. Because I wasn’t getting yelled at. So when I saw the consequences of our actions, it was almost from the outside looking in. Through the lens of the damage it had caused, not the shame or indignation of being pulled out of the classroom and yelled at. I saw, as an onlooker, Mrs. Brown’s horror and rage, Dan’s shame and humiliation, the rest of the class’s judgement. We were mean girls. Mean.

I could go on for pages waxing philosophical (and psychological) about that story. I was, in my own right, not a mean girl or a bully and I didn’t care one bit if Dan was gay or straight or just really liked to play dress up. But how easily I had become one of the girls who would pick on him, who would shape his life story in a negative way, contribute to his lifetime of struggling for being different. And I was different! Very different, and I got picked on and bullied for it. And yet, given the opportunity I’d been willing to do the same to another person just to fit in. There’s so much to talk about there… But we don’t have time for all that right now. The main point in this instance is that I regret doing it. Nearly 4 decades later, I think about that day and I regret my actions. I wish I could go back and undo it. Even though I know that, at our core, we’re all capable of that and much worse, I hate that I’m the kind of person who would do something like that. What I did was unkind and inexcusable. It was a shitty thing to do, and I regret it.

Somewhere along the way in our society, regret became synonymous with inferiority. I constantly hear people say “no regrets” like it makes them a more positive or evolved person. If you’re successful, if you’re happy, if you’re cool, then you have no regrets. What a load of shit! Having regret is important! Having regret is just admitting that you’ve made mistakes. That you’re a better person than you were yesterday. You know better because you’re wiser, kinder. We’ve all done something that we wish we could change or take back. Treated someone unfairly, been unkind, stayed in a relationship too long or left too soon, hurt someone we love, hurt someone we didn’t even know. We’re human beings, we are all imperfect.

In Judaism there is something called Viddui, prayers of confession that we say on Yom Kippur. One of the prayers, Ashamnu, the shorter confession, is a list of sins from A to Z. A sin for every letter of the alphabet. And we recite each one because, as humans, we know we commit these sins and more all the time. It’s customary that during this prayer, as you name each sin, you strike your heart with your fist. Some traditional interpretations of this act claim it’s because the heart is the seat and the source of sin. But I think it’s because the heart is the seat and source of regret. After all, why confess if not because we regret what we’ve done? We strike our heart to symbolize the pain of knowing we’ve done wrong. We strike our hearts to symbolize the pain of regret. That pain inspires us to promise to do better in the year to come. It’s that pain that keeps us from continuing to do wrong.

I’m a pretty good person. I served in the military, I pay my taxes, I recycle, I signal before I change lanes, I donate 5% of my income to charity. I like to think I’m a decent friend. I may not be the perfect mom but I love my daughter with every fiber of my being and I try to be better for her every day. And I have regrets. There are people in my life I wish I had treated better, or walked away from sooner when they didn’t treat me better. There are times I wish I’d been more patient with my daughter. Bridges I wish I hadn’t burned. Times I wish I’d stood up for myself. Lies I wish I hadn’t told. For me to say I have no regrets would essentially mean I don’t care about the wrong I’ve done or the damage it caused. But I do care. I know I can’t go back in time and fix any of it, but I can remember it. My regrets inform my choices, they guide me. They give me strength, they help me to do better and be better. Regret fosters increased compassion, empathy, emotional intelligence. Regret is not a dirty word. Regret is a building block.