Regrets

I have always believed that there is no sense in living life with regrets. It may be a cliché to say that everything happens for a reason, but it's true. The reasons may not always be good and they may not be something that we can easily understand, but there are reasons no less. I'll discuss this idea more in an upcoming post on "bashert."

Given my philosophy, I'm hard-pressed to come up with anything that I regret. Sure, I wish I was better at sending birthday cards on time or keeping my desk organized on a regular basis, but that's not the kind of thing one regrets. It's just the kind of annoying quirk everyone has that he or she would like to work on. Or not.

Still, though, something sticks with me. I've come to terms with the fact that I'm athletically challenged, a perpetual procrastinator, and definitely the worst car-parker on the planet. I've even settled my internal turmoil about never keeping up with Girl Scouts, because let's be honest, I just wanted to collect the badges anyway. What I haven't gotten over, however, is that I never got better at singing.

Every little girl wants to be a dancer or actress or singer at some point in her life. Most of them get over it. I gave up dancing practically before I picked it up. I gave up choir after freshman year in high school and theater after sophomore year. I'm a writer; I've always been a writer. I'm more than okay with that--I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to do something I love and be respected for doing it. But there's still that little part of me that's stuck on my 7th grade mentality and wants to sing on a big stage in front of thousands of people.

Maybe part of me wants to be a little bit like Susan Boyle--to prove everybody wrong. Perhaps it's because of all those people who told the sobbing, fourteen-year-old version of myself that Michael Jordan never made his high school basketball team, so there was still hope for me to be a great singer.

But now I'm 20. I've never had professional voice lessons, I only made it into select choir in my last year of middle school because I cried too much, and if you could hear me singing in my car driving down the highway, you'd know there really is no hope for me to ever become a great singer.

So that's my one regret for my twenty years of life so far: that I never found a way to have the kind of singing voice that would make people wonder if I could be a pop star. Even though I would never want to be a pop star, I can't help still wishing I had the chance to knock somebody off his feet with a powerhouse solo on a big stage. If ever they come up with a magical cure for a terrible singing voice, be sure I'm the first person you call, so I can check that solo off my list of things to do before I die.