Have you ever been so thoroughly disgusted by an experience that you actually vomit? You didn’t eat anything weird. You don’t have norovirus. You are just fundamentally grossed out by an exchange, a memory, a person, something, and as a result you unexpectedly find yourself retching into your toilet. This happened to me recently. It was weirdly amazing to experience how such a response could be elicited by abstract processing without a physical stimulus. The human body is an incredible machine of moral reasoning beyond just the mind.
Something probably bizarre about me is that I unironically enjoy throwing up. It does not bring me overt pleasure, but it brings unparalleled relief. It is close to the top of my list of physically and spiritually cathartic human experiences. It has a quality of metaphorical exorcism. It requires complete submission to the experience, something that feels like good practice for submitting oneself to God. I wouldn’t make myself vomit for sport, but I’ll always try to induce it if I’m nauseous. The other day I didn’t try. It just happened. I Passed Nausea and Lost $12 (price of my lunch). But nausea is insufferably tedious and exhausting. It’s impossible to distract myself from. If nausea is uncertainty, vomiting is decision, and I’d prefer a decision even if it is extremely uncomfortable.
As I was yakking it occurred to me, for whatever reason, that permitting nausea to continue out of avoidance of throwing up shares an energetic pattern with gaslighting oneself to avoid fully confronting a noxious situation. Perhaps that is why I vomited, like some psycho-physical consequence of deceiving myself and being deceived. For the time in my life in which that was the case, it was indeed like living in a state of constant nausea. I tried to distract myself from the nausea, or let others distract me, or talk me out of feeling it at all. There was no reason for the nausea, and I was simply inducing it with my irrational perspective. I could think my way out of it with The Power of Intellect! Alas. The nausea continued.
Maybe reactive vomiting after ignoring one’s gut instinct for a long enough time is a corrective response. I strongly believe that repressed emotions eventually, or sometimes quickly, emerge as physical ailments. (Obviously this belief requires a fine balance between assuming someone is effectively being hysterical and identifying actual disease.) So if your gut is the sensory home of base instincts like disgust and fear, and you go on long enough ignoring those, trying to outrun them with intellect or hope, eventually the gut revolts (ha). That which is disgusting elicits disgust, like it once did, before you started ignoring it. You (I) didn’t listen to your gut when it was signaling Danger with an uneasy tugging, so now it has to get more forceful, resulting in your (my) head hovering above the toilet. Sad.
I shall not regale you of the absurd events that preceded my upchucking. What I will say is that it left me spiraling out in many directions, literally crying out Why did I do this? I never should have done any of this. Fortunately, I had therapy soon after, and this proved re-stabilizing. I’ve been assigned homework to reflect on the question “Who would I be without my intellectual capability?” He also said he hopes my next process of sanctification is easier on me than this most recent bout, which was somehow deeply validating.
Anyway, in my remorseful anguish a question tugged at me: Is there anything I don’t regret? I momentarily feared there is a peculiarity in my functioning that will inevitably lead me to a narrative of regret, like some kind of body dysmorphia that extends to moral self-assessments also. Like contamination OCD except apply it to a retrospective evaluation of everything I’ve ever done and fear for everything I ever will do in the future.
I frequently feel plagued by regret, the kind born of poor choices. I anguish over ways I’ve abandoned myself when I needed protecting, especially when I’ve devoted myself to something that led me astray (aka anything but God I guess?). For someone who tends to believe in fate, or everything happening for a reason, I really do struggle to make peace with my past decisions. I try not to actively dwell, because a missed opportunity is just that: missed. A poor choice was made, the consequences have arrived, and now all that’s left is to clean up the mess and try to not make the same error in judgment again. The past is the past, move along.
Yet, my mind regrets on autopilot. Perhaps this is genetic Catholicism. I don’t even have to be conscious to be ruminating. So much of my psychology over the last 5 years has been regret-centric. I regretted choices I made when I was in college, and then after college, and so on. My anti-cancel culture era was born of regret for my involvement in identitarian politics. I regretted my choice of school, I regretted my first relationship, I regretted drinking, I regretted trying weed, then I regretted getting close with the wrong people. Then, I regretted things I was doing in the moment: working dead end jobs, eating shitty food, floundering in my career because I didn’t know where to go because I regretted not taking opportunities when I was younger.
Now, after this emesis session (emesession?), I have had a Realization. I have been paralyzed by this thought pattern. Through the years, my regret-centricity turned into a type of learned helplessness and indecision. It led me to believe all kinds of lies about myself and the world, perhaps most saliently that I could never overcome my past errors. I disqualified myself from so much joy, connection and opportunity because of regret.
It led me to lose touch with my intuition over and over again. It is a vicious cycle in that way; I disobey my intuition, I make a choice I regret, I lose touch with my intuition, it is easier to disobey it, it is easier to make a choice I regret…and so on. One downstream effect is that I trust myself less, and then end up deferring to other people’s reason. I cannot trust myself, so I should seek counsel from everyone else, or simply defer to someone I see as more reasonable than myself.
In effect, I could not find the clarity or strength to make my own decisions. I stopped trusting myself, and I also came to have a low view of my own worth. Or, at least not a right-sized view of it. I finally started to break out of this pattern when I made the difficult choice to leave my relationship. In making a new decision that was explicitly in the interest of living a life of integrity, I liberated myself from the binding force of regret for my past choices. Yet, I fell back into my old pattern once I got involved in a situation after my break up that, to sustain, required me to constantly compromise on my morals and deeply degrade my worth. I wove in and out of self-deception and remorse, acceptance of a delusion and horrified clarity. By the end, I felt tremendous regret, and was thrown back into that paralysis prison I had just begun to leave.
Someone I was once close to would often lament that he wishes he could be a sociopath, because life would be so much easier if he didn’t feel guilty. He sincerely wished he could commit moral transgressions without remorse. Once after commending my “ability to shoulder such a vast swath of heavy emotions for [myself] while still having the space and strength to respect [his],” he inquired, “It’s impressive that YOU don’t want to be a sociopath. Wouldn’t all of this be easier?” No. I do not wish I could escape my conscience; I wish I could obey it better. That is the source of my regret. I knew better than this. I saw this coming. I had the wisdom, but I ignored it. I don’t want to evade the moral consequence of my poor behavior, I want to find the strength to act right in the first place.
So, perhaps my regret paralysis serves a purpose, or it intends to. It is, like the vomiting earlier, an advanced stage of my mind trying to get me back into moral shape, but the outcome of that demand being ignored. Maybe regret would be easier to part ways with if I could see that which I regret as something of the past, a historical error to forgive, rather than an ongoing struggle against my present choices. Aha! There it is. I have persistent regret because I have indeed been living a regrettable life not only in the distant past, but the immediate one.
I have failed to learn the lesson that, to maintain my sanity, I must obey my conscience above all else. I must make choices from a place of integrity to my moral compass, even (perhaps especially) when that means denying myself something especially alluring. I am not doomed to rewrite my past from a condemning lens of regret. I just sincerely have not yet mastered the art of listening to my gut, so I haven’t repaired my relationship with myself or my conscience enough to break out of this paralysis.
Some people’s digestive system gets destroyed by eating fried food, and must eliminate this from their diet even though it is tasty. I am sensitive to moral missteps in a parallel way, I think. It has a devastating impact on my functioning (particularly that of my gut, hence vomiting) when I act outside of my conscience, even if doing so is temporarily enjoyable. No amount of intellectual gymnastics will overpower my conscience, and I don’t have the time to be paralyzed by regret. I’ve got important things to do.
I must therefore make Conscionable Choices, which first requires good discernment. How do I hone discernment between the regrettable and the desirable? How can I anticipate that I will regret something, given regret is a retrospective feeling that you only feel after the fact? Intuition usually gives me a fair warning of danger. My gut knows! I imagine it would help to recall what it feels like when I have done things I don’t regret, and to feel out the difference in recollecting such events. So, what have I done with my life that I feel wholly content with?
What immediately comes to mind: Traveling to Ireland in 2022, musical theater when I was young, breaking up with my ex last January, adopting my cat Frankincense, every single karaoke night, brunch with my friend last weekend, meeting Louise from Instagram in Dublin, moving back in with my parents, challenging myself academically in high school and college, lifting weights consistently last year, sacrificing a higher wage to work in residential mental health treatment. When I think of these, I feel a surge of life flow through me. It actually makes me feel good about myself, grateful to be alive, and craving a life where I get to do more of these, or follow the same impulses that led me to them. This brightness and love is what I must pursue. Not mere ambition or righteousness.
Since leaving my relationship last year, I have endeavored to build a life for myself that I no longer need to escape from. I only seek to escape when I feel trapped, and so often I am trapped under the restraining force of regret. If that feeling is born of making choices that are not aligned with my values, I must prioritize living a life of sober integrity. I must be honest with myself, and I must obey my conscience and intuition. Then I must next identify what it is that stands in the way of doing those things. How do I end up deceived and losing the plot of my own life, as I have throughout the last decade+? How do I intervene on that before it happens?
This was once all so effortless for me. My conscience has always been strong, and as a young person I followed my gut instincts. Something changed. I simply have not recovered from my earliest moral injuries, try as I might to overcome them. And each subsequent misstep is like a knife to an exposed nerve. This feels like learning how to walk again. Perhaps all of that is for another navel-gazing Substack essay.
For now, I shall simply say that I am ready to shift out of a paradigm of regret and disappointment into one of gratitude and grace. I will still feel the former, but I no longer want it to be the guiding force behind my choices. The thing that must guide me is not fear of the same old anguish, but desire for increasing true joy. The pain was there for the purpose of pointing me back to what is truly right, not just for languishing in the mere suffering of it.
i love this piece. thank you ❤️