“No Regrets”? 4 Things I Wish I Never Did

“No regrets”? – This is a saying I use often and one I generally live by. I say no regrets because even bad experiences are learning experiences, and in that case, how can you regret something that has made you into a better person? But at the same time I’m also human, and there are things I occasionally look back on that do make me squirm, a few things that I definitely would erase/change if I had the power to, perhaps hoping for other and less painful methods to learn these various lessons…

I wish I took more chances in university
I wish I never let fears stop me from pursuing different opportunities. There was a certain opportunity to run for a society back in uni I’ve spoken about in the past that I used to really kick myself for missing out on. Just because it was something I knew I was capable of, but something I plain and simply chickened out of and instead took the route of a secondary option (ie. still joining a society, but running for a role that I knew I’d get, staying within my own little box). I’m not a very risky person and whilst I occasionally spend a lot of time in my comfort zone I also know when it’s time to push myself out of it and do things that do make me feel uncomfortable but will better me. I learned from this that opportunities we miss are just opportunities we’ll regret not taking, as we’ll always wonder what could’ve been. I wouldn’t call this a current regret anymore (you know, life moves on), but it’s definitely a decision that got me down for at least a good year.

“Opportunities we miss are just opportunities we’ll regret not taking”

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I wish I utilised my free time more effectively
When people tell me they’re ready to graduate and get started with ‘real’ life and working I always feel like telling them to just chill. There are not many times in your life where you’ll have as much free time as you do in uni to just do whatever you want – when you start working that will consume the majority of your time and everything else you want to do will just need to be balanced with work. Whilst I would blog here and there, and to be fair I was quite active in various societies such as my uni’s Women in Business Society and newspaper, The Beaver, I more utilised my non-library time by reveling in 10 hours of sleep a day. Now that I am working full time I’ve gotten better at managing my time such that I can fit other activities around it (being this blog, other upcoming projects or even working out) – but this all of course would have been way easier to organise when I did have all the time in the world, once upon a time.

I wish I gave some people less of my time
We have all heard the saying that you need to “kiss a few frogs to find your prince”, but I wish I didn’t have the learn that lesson as harshly as I did. I wish that I had realised my worth enough at age 18 to know that I didn’t have to settle for anything less than what I thought I deserved. I know younger girls now that won’t settle for less just because they don’t want to be ‘alone’, but it seems that a few years back, me and all my friends just had our heads in the gutter. You live and you learn.

I wish I had been more open about my side hustles
Whilst Skylish as a beauty/fashion blog has been around (‘seriously’) for just a few years now, I’ve actually been online since around… forever. I’ve been coding and designing since I was 10 years old, and when I turned 15 I started selling webdesigns. But I was always very secretive about what I was doing, and my worst nightmare was that people from school would find out I made websites which meant I’d do everything in my power to ensure this didn’t happen. Be that nicknaming myself online, chopping my head out of photos, or living in constant fear that someone would find me (I even had nightmares about it at a time), I wanted to be utterly and totally secret. However, doing that meant I held myself and my growth back a bit. Part of building up a presence online and with a blog is connecting and identifying with your readers – but how was I to do that when my readers couldn’t even really know who I was because my priority was to hide?

I do indeed have a few regrets but I can’t say at all that these keep me up at night. These really are just things that cross my mind on occasion, maybe warrant a sigh, but then I move on with my life. Life is more about learning than regrets, and we’ll all have things that we wish we didn’t do, but that we recognise are what built and shaped us into who we are now. I’m only 22, I have the rest of my life ahead of me – I’m more concerned about making sure I don’t take any life actions now that I reach 60 and wish I hadn’t, because by then, the majority of your destiny has already been determine. There’s not time like the present, and no better time to determine your future than acting whilst you’re young.

Photos: Marianne Olaleye