What To Do if You've Wrecked Your Life

Probably the biggest thing you'll ever face if you've wrecked your life is regret. Regret is the stinging acid that sends its corrosive poisons all through who you are. Regret eats you from the inside out, until you're little more than an empty shell of a person going through the motions of existence. But your soul is gone. Your light has been put out. 

Sometimes you feel shattered. Like something crashed inside, something tender and precious and fragile. You lay in broken shards, bleeding, wounded without so much as a bandage to staunch the bleeding. You bleed and bleed and bleed. This is regret. This is what it does to you. You lay awake asking ad infinitum why you did what you did. You plumb the depths of your mind for the answers  that never come.

If you've wrecked your life, there comes a time where you have to sit down and grieve. Just grieve. You have to let down the blinders that keep you from seeing all the damage you caused, and look at the horror full in the face. You have to accept total responsibility for what you did. You have to come to terms with the fact that yes, you are that kind of person that did that thing. That is exactly who you are. It wasn't a fluke. It wasn't an accident. It was you, doing what you wanted to do in the moment you did it.

So you grieve the fact you are capable of such destruction, of authoring such misery and pain. You grieve the brokenness you caused. You grieve the suffering you initiated. You grieve the reality of the fact that you cannot undo what you did. That you cannot take back time for a second chance at not doing it.

Then you must forgive yourself. Grieve first, forgive next. There is nothing to forgive if  you first don't come to terms with how you have wrecked things. Once you have, you can then forgive yourself. Forgiveness means you'll no longer hold what you did against yourself and punish yourself to the grave.

You can grieve your failure, forgive your behavior, but you must also seek  forgiveness from those you betrayed with your actions. You must sit down with them, look them in the eyes and plead for mercy. You must do everything in your power to demonstrate genuine remorse and seek to make restitution.

Then, perhaps, if you're fortunate, you can begin to rise from the wreckage. Fortunate if you don't have to go it alone. There has to be someone who loves you enough to believe in you enough to give you the gift of another chance.  There must be another soul, perhaps broken, too, who sees what you cannot possibly see in yourself for all your sorrow: a human life worth saving. Only then can you can rise and begin to hope again.
Find that one soul. If you can't, I'm broken, too. I'm here for you...