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Youth is Wasted on the Young

"Woulda Could Shoulda Buddha, that's my name"
Laura Love,
I Am Gonna Miss You

I have an unhealthy obsession with regret. I'm not sure if obsession is the right word, because obsession implies something you yearn for, look forward to, desire. Trust me, this is not one of those things.

In the film "It's a Wonderful Life", there is a quip borrowed from George Bernard Shaw, uttered when Jimmy Stewart passes up an opportunity to kiss Donna Reid in the bushes because he is just a little too shy. An onlooking neighbor is disgusted with Stewart and yells out "Aw - youth is wasted on the young". The movie is an American tradition that we are spoon fed every Christmas that is supposed to make us feel better about our lives. George Baily, played by Stewart, is given a chance to see what the world would have been like without him, and is thereby made grateful for his existence - no matter how disappointed he has been in it. It's a great movie, but somehow it brings out the cynic in most Americans. It doesn't quite salve the wound, I think, and no one likes to be reminded of all the things they would have done with their life, but didn't.

I have lived almost 40 years on this planet now, 25 of those years I was out from under parental supervision and most of those struggling with unmedicated manic depression. Unlike Jimmy Stewart, I did not live a particularly safe life. I thought I didn't want to regret the things I hadn't done. So I have a lot of water under the bridge.

I feel like it has been more than my fair share. More love affairs. More moves across the country. More broken hearts. More deaths. More poverty. More failed opportunities. For example, in one particular year of my life, I broke my leg. No big deal, it happens. Well I was coming down off a three day manic phase, having just attended a comics convention, driven all night, and cooked dinner for the guys in the car. Then I watched as they flew off the roof onto a trampoline below. I decided I wasn't getting enough exercise, and if they could play Peter Pan, so could I.

No fool, though, I didn't get onto the roof, just onto the tramp itself. Just a few safe bounces, up and down. My lover at the time decided to jump along with me, which set the trampoline up in an unsynchronized pattern. I came down at the wrong angle and shattered my tibia and fibula right through the skin and muscle of my leg like so much shrapnel. Shards of broken bone protruded from my leg. Blood soaked my grey tennis dress - I would never see that again. I was screaming so loudly you could hear me all over the neighborhood and I have never experienced anything remotely like that much pain in my life.

From there I had the good fortune to be taken to what is reported to be the worst hospital in the whole of the United States (no kidding, they did a study). There the doctor proceeded to operate on me and leave pieces of dead bone in my leg to rot, fester, and infect the marrow of my bone.

Then came the tricky part. I had some insurance. Enough to cover $30,000 worth of medical repair. The infected leg would require an additional $50,000, four surgeries, and the better part of a year in a wheelchair. Even then, they didn't know if I would walk again. If I didn't have the leg repaired, it would have to be amputated to keep from infecting the rest of my body.

I had a second insurance card. An old beau had listed me on his insurance when we planned to get married and had never taken me off when we decided not to get married. I consulted him. It was a choice between losing my leg or risking getting caught using a medical card that was not strictly legitimate. We decided to used the card.

We got caught.

He lost his job. He filed bankruptcy. I filed bankruptcy. I looked for a lawyer to sue the doctor originally responsible for my botched leg to cover the medical costs, but California law only allows one year for a plaintiff to file suit. During that year I was unable to find a lawyer to take the case because I hadn't actually lost the leg. If I had lost the leg, the case might be worth a few million, but as it was, it wouldn't cover the court costs to go after the man for medical expenses - at least not in the lawyers' eyes.

The boyfriend who bounced the trampoline left me when the money ran out. I wasn't able to work and I had to start my life entirely over. I had to learn to walk all over again. Oh, and the ex-fiance, Harvey, stood by me all throughout rehab.

I spent years regretting the price Harvey paid for my leg. I regretted getting up on the trampoline. I regretted the help I needed afterwards. After almost ten years I have made peace with the accident and its affect on those around me. Harvey forgave me instantly. I did not forgive myself so easily. But over time it healed and now I can talk about it fairly openly.

The regret that doesn't heal is about the things I had less control over.

I once knew a woman who was bi-polar whose skull looked like a fractured eggshell, she had broken it so many times. I went on to fracture a disc in my spine falling down a flight of stairs. I walked away from a car totaled by a semi-truck. I tried to start publishing a magazine, not once but twice. And my business partner's brother committed suicide.

For reasons no one can explain, bi-polar people live interesting lives. And not in a good way. Interesting in the Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times" way. Sure, half the stuff that happens to us is our fault, but half of it is just bad luck. Had one bucket fall on your head, may as well toss on a few others.

Which brings me to the subject of medication. Suddenly not only is my internal life quiet, but my external life has gotten incredibly dull as well. Well, on good days I'd say peaceful. Nothing is blowing up. No bill collectors are hounding at the door. I have a good husband, a good home, a good job, a good partner, and a good doctor - oh and proper insurance as well.

Still I regret.

All those things I could have done differently if I had been in my "right mind". It doesn't seem to matter to me that these are common symptoms of my illness. In fact, my doctor tells me, that given the severity of my illness, my behavior has been fairly controlled.

Doesn't matter.

The year I entered college, Ronald Reagan was elected. Shortly after he took office, he began to dismantle, among other things, the support for poor kids going to school.

A whole bunch of us from the same high school were on a combination of merit scholarships and aid packages. The two who actually graduated lied about their parent's contribution to their education and dealt drugs on the side to eek their way through school. The rest of us fell by the wayside. Ever one of us took it as a personal failure, not as a statistical phenomena.

I don't know the details of the other stories, but I can tell you that in my case, I ran out of money and stamina. I lived in Michigan, which was going through a recession at the time. What work there was didn't pay well. I held down three jobs. One was modeling for the art department so that I could sleep on the job. I was almost making up for the financial shortfall. I was in an honors program. I was on the dean's list. But I was also in and out of the hospital with repeated kidney and lung infections. Putting myself through school was killing me.

I left school.

I thought I would go back. I dropped out to get married -- these stories always involve a man, it seems - who promised that I could return to school after he took a good position being offered to him in another state. One of my teachers thought I was dropping out because I was pregnant and offered to adopt my child to keep me in school.

If only I could have said - adopt me! It's me that needs a room. But I didn't know how to begin to ask for the help I needed.

The man didn't keep his word about schooling. I didn't stay married. And I never made it back to school. I tried, but I have been working very, very hard pretty much ever since. Mostly I have worked as a freelancer, and never had the time, the money, or the well being to go back to school.

Yet the first job I had with good insurance got me the medical treatment I needed for my bi-polar disorder. How much differently my life might have been if I had been able to ask for help when I was 19. As it was, I proved myself as a writer the hard way - but the hard way was so very hard. I couldn't fall back on a teaching position or an editorial job or any number of the other things I was ultimately qualified to do.

I regret because I never made a choice about quitting school. I was unconsciously falling out of school. As I was older I saw options - but then I couldn't. I simply had no idea how to ask. What was there to prepare me for life in the real world? Nothing in high school prepared me for the challenges of my actual life - only the challenges of more school. And so I regret what was done in ignorance.

Not just quitting school, but years worth of things. On some level there is a smoldering fury that my younger years were run by a child who had no idea what she was doing. I mean, it is my life - why did that inexperienced brat get to make such a mess of it? I regret things that, given where I came from and what I was equipped with, I could not have possibly known.

"Youth is wasted on the young." Well, youth is where we fumble and flail and fail and choose. Had I chosen the safer path, like George Bailey, I might regret the risks I had not taken. Instead I regret the risks I did take. The times I was too trusting, the times I took on too much, tried too hard, over extended myself and my resources. The times I bent to the breaking point. I cannot say I have not learned in those years. The lessons seem so obvious now - but they were so muddy at the time.

The nature of being young is that it is impossible to know what we do not know. Here I stand, at the precipice of 40, looking at the next 25 years, fully aware that I may have no idea what I am doing. I also know that I have lived more in the last twenty five years than many people do in their whole lifetimes. I have gained mastery at many things and only needed the calming influence of the right medication to make leveraged use of that knowledge.

I can count my successes, though it is not my habit, and give credit to that child I am so angry at - but it seems like one of those new age exercises and sounds a little simplistic. Still, peace must be made. There is some forgiveness that must happen somehow. We cannot today blame our yesterday's self for things we only know because those yesterdays are behind us. The plain truth of it is that we cannot live our lives retroactively.

No matter how much we wish we could.

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