Anxiety, Regrets, and Forgiveness by Ella

Anxiety, Regrets, and Forgiveness by Ella - June 2022 Scholarship Essay

I have been obsessed with time-loop movies since I was a little girl. Recently, I’ve discovered it’s because I yearned to be in the character's position. Having all the time in the world... sign me up. But in reality, it’s due to my mourning of lives I’ve never lived. I’ve spent countless days tormenting myself about what I could have done better, what I should have said, or even what I shouldn’t have said. With time loops, you don’t have to worry about mistakes because they’ll just be erased. On a random afternoon at Target, there was a buy-one-get-one-free sale for movies and books; all I wanted was the movie "Last Night in Soho", and since the movie selection was lacking, I wandered over to the books to find "The Midnight Library". I picked it out specifically because the main character, Nora Seed, had an infinite number of lives that she could live through at the midnight library to expel her past regrets. And I oh so wished I could do the same. No matter what, Nora was not content with the life she thought she wanted. I thought she was foolish.
Through Nora’s journey, she found that with each patched regret came a missing piece of what she loved about her normal life. Though she could have been a rockstar, a pub owner, an olympian, or a mother, it wasn’t who she truly was. In the end, she had the revelation that it’s not what you regret, but the regret itself that does the scarring. And it struck me that I need to forgive myself for what I didn’t or did do years ago because unfortunately, you can’t mend the past; all you can do is live for the future.