Instant Replay

First, tequila in the late afternoon is delicious. I am sitting here sipping a margarita getting ready to start dinner and I feel pretty good! I've never been a Big Spring Cleaner but this week I've been turning over a new leaf. We moved a bunch of furniture, granted it was last night around 11pm. We repaired a bunch of nail pops on our walls, courtesy of the blasting they were doing to make room for new homes. I cleaned out our front closet and organized it and put a bunch of stuff aside for either donation or Ebay. And I have almost all of our laundry cleaned and folded. I've done an excellent job of avoiding all of my school work and work work. Sounds productive to me....margarita well deserved!!

Do you ever think about what you would have said? What you would have done? I enjoyed the move "You've Got Mail". Meg Ryan talks about how she wishes she could say the perfect thing at the right time and then she does and she feels terrible. She's nasty to the Tom Hanks character because his company is taking over her mom and pop shop. She at first feels victorious at being able to be so snappy and quick tongued and then feels bad. Her emotions and character get the best of her and she realizes that she has spoken as someone that she is not. She shares this with the Tom Hanks character before she knows that he is the one she has been instant messaging with. He comforts her and they move on.

I often think about what I would have said or could have done or said in previous situations. I replay things in my head forever. I am terrible at forgetting. That whole forgive and forget thing. Yeah.....doesn't always work well for me. My best friend and I were talking about this during the past week. She and I are very similar in the fact that we have a very hard time forgetting about what people have said and done in the past. And it's not always the bad things that stay in our heads. We remember the good things. I'll never ever forget the kindness that people showed us when the boy was in the hospital. There are things that I think about surrounding that whole time and I wish I had said or done differently. I wish I had shown more gratitude to F's sister. I wish I hadn't been in my head so much thinking about the next thing or next medicine times or things like that. I wish I had stopped for a moment and recognized the kindness of her actions in the moments that they were occurring. Don't get me wrong, I thanked her, I cried, I appreciated all she did but there was a part of me trying to move back to talking to the resident and getting medicine in the boy. (All things that are completely understandable but I just wish I had stayed in that moment for a little longer.)

Then there are the bad things, the sad things, the anger filled things. The times when I wish I could have said things differently. The times when I wish I had stood up for myself more and said what was on my mind and heart rather than what people wanted to hear. The times when I wish I had stopped it all and said enough was enough. I wish I hadn't accepted all the blame. I wish I had pointed out what I felt others did to make the situation worse. I wish I had taken a little bit more of the responsibility off my shoulders and just said what I wanted to say and moved on. I wish I could have expressed my feelings better, or at all. I didn't want to rock the boat. I didn't want to deal. I thought I was wrong. I thought it would create too many problems and I didn't want to deal with any of it.

Now it festers. Now I instant replay it like the worst call in a football game. Now I sit and I pick apart the arguments and the discussions and everything else and I see what I wanted to say and what I should have said and it festers. I get upset because there's so much more I want to say. And I can't forget.

Instant replay makes it impossible for me to close the door and move on because I'm so focused on the plays that don't matter anymore. I'm engrossed by what went wrong and how it could have come out differently because instant replay is in my head all the time.

For some reason that scene from the Lion King just popped into my head where Rafiki smacks Simba on the head and Simba gets annoyed and says, "What was that for?"
Rafiki replies, "It doesn't matter, it's in the past."
I only wish it were that simple.