In which I get partially philosophical and really just ramble, so to spare you all I am putting it under a cut. I am nothing if not polite.
You know, I've had this whole thing rolling around in my head about how I always saw myself as a dude who did not spend time regretting past decisions and yet as I get older I keep coming back to stuff I tried and failed (for one reason or another) or wanted to do when I was younger, like learn how to use a skateboard or keep playing the drums or give the whole fiction-writing thing a real fucking go (whatever that means?); except now I actually have a little money and free time and so I have been doing it - which is to say I went out and taught myself (with the help of youtube and some bruises and a few new scars and also a wrist that now is a little stiffer than before because I probably fractured it at some point) how to skate, and it is a new thing that I do well enough that I go out and skate and it fucking rules, and I have roped my brother into a collaborative writing project that I am sure we will thrust into the cold light of day (assuming I don't kill myself skating), and this very evening I said fuck it and bought a bitchin' e-drum kit that wasn't too expensive and I can fit in my apartment and play and not torment my downstairs neighbors, and all of this stuff happened because I found myself feeling something which I could only call regret at letting things pass me by for one reason or another.
So maybe it's not that regret is something to avoid after all, maybe it's all in what you do about feeling regret that actually matters. I think maybe it can be what you use to help yourself become a better person, or more like the person you want to be? Maybe. I still don't know! I know that working on a big dumb fiction idea is fun, even if months go by where neither I nor my brother manage to write anything we actually like or want to keep, and I know that skating is fun (there's no caveat here, falling down is fun, getting bruises and scrapes is fun, falling is the point, and maybe there's something longer I could say about what skating has done for me in terms of like, Changing My Life in a very real way but that's for another time) and even though I am in part terrified about how fucking rusty and decrepit my drumming skills are gonna be (because I haven't touched a drumset since, conservatively, 2010) I am also excited to pick that shit up again and wail on some stuff with some sticks! I feel like my 30s have been and continue to be me getting increasingly weird with it, so to speak, whether through like actually, finally becoming comfortable in my own skin or just pushing myself to do stuff I would normally make a billion different excuses to avoid actually trying, and now... I dunno, maybe that's a good thing? Maybe I just got tired of worrying about shit that probably doesn't matter, actually, and I've hit the point where at this point I've done so much shit that I never imagined doing as a kid that I might as well keep it rolling and see where this all goes.
Or maybe I am having a midlife crisis which is pretty fucking early, if you ask me, but I gotta consider the possibility.