Poetic Focus™—Entry 13: Regret as a Lifeline 🎭

I am so happy and grateful for regret.

Once, I lived in an attic. I was broke and needed a place to live that I could trade time for instead of money. The outdoor shed at an assisted living facility had an attic space, and my ex-husband and I made it a home.

I worked nights and went to school during the day. I have never felt exhaustion like I did then.

And yet—it was fun.

It was the days when phones had cords, and we strung a very, very long one from the facility into the attic. It barely reached. So when we talked on the phone, we had to sit at the very edge. It was an A-frame room, so our heads had to tilt. It was actually better just to lie down. Graduation was approaching, and I wanted something to wear besides hiking pants and Birkenstocks. I didn’t know where to shop, so I called a professor.

Not because they teach.

Because I loved how she dressed.

She was from New York, so I was certain she’d have the skinny. But when I called, I was derailed. She answered crying. She was one of the founders of a salon theater in town—and it was going under. I couldn’t bear to see that happen. But more than that, I needed to stop the tears from falling. So I offered to help and set out to do the impossible: bring a 49-seat theater in a small town in Colorado out of the red and set it up for the future.

It still thrives today.

But when I think about that year, I think of failure. Because at that time, I didn’t know how to regulate. I didn’t know that high performance meant starting a day with Poetic Focus—giving gratitude and making sense of things that don’t. I didn’t know that alcohol depleted me of positivity. I didn’t know that sleep enhanced cognitive performance and flushed out metabolic waste—the unusable, often toxic byproducts created by cells during normal metabolism. So I exhausted myself. By the end of the year, I could barely function.

Total burnout.

Total collapse.

I had gone to college for a communications and theater arts degree. I had the best job in town. And I lost it. I don’t believe we should avoid regret. I believe regret is a powerful tool for enhancement—the part of life that gives us the most perspective. It leaves a hole in the heart that is never fully filled—except by knowing you’ve become a better person because of it.

Regret didn’t ruin me.
It refined me.

And today, I have a vision: to return to that theater and speak.
To spread the message that rebuilding after collapse is possible.

And perhaps that will be the ultimate moment—
when I string the cord from that assisted living attic
and it becomes a lifeline to possibility.

A metaphor made real.

📸 Different phone. Same lifeline.
#WakeUpBook