Tuesday Retrospective! Let's talk bad decisions.

I have almost no regrets. I don't read much into that--I know some people think it means you're strong, or lucky, or perfectly happy in your life, and maybe all three of those things are true for me to some extent. But really I just think it's chaos theory. If you're miserable then maybe you'd have regrets because you'd wish to be in another place in your life, you know? But in my case I'm really happy with where I am so even if there are things that I would have done differently at the time, I wouldn't go back and change them because they helped me get to where I am today and be the person I am.

Still, I have definitely made some poor decisions in my life. Let's see. In no particular order:

1. Getting into a long-distance relationship with a camp boyfriend early in high school. We hardly knew each other, really. And what a waste of time and energy that was. Long distance is hard enough if you're really committed and have an end date for the distance, you know? But when you're 15 and have no idea if you'll ever be near each other, and know for sure that if you are it won't be for another four years? No, no, no.

2. Not traveling more when I was living in Africa. I wouldn't call this a bad decision exactly, because it was made more due to necessity than due to a lack of desire. I wanted to travel to countries in southern Africa and I was living in northwestern Africa, and that kind of trip wasn't easy or cheap, and I was a poor student. Still, though. It would have been great if I had found a way to make it work, because well, I was already there, I was independent, the timing was perfect. And now I'm dying to go to South Africa and Kenya and Tanzania. But hey, Torsten wants to go to those places too, and it will be fun to go with him.

3. OK, not to be superficial but in middle school I had this heinous pink sweatshirt that I wore Every. Single. Day. What was I thinking and why did my parents allow it? Although, it did work out well one year when we were supposed to write generic descriptions of friends we'd like to have, and then we looked at them all and matched up people who seemed to be looking for each other, and then it was unveiled who was who? And my best friend and I rigged it so that we'd be matched up, and one of the descriptors she used was the pink sweatshirt. We were STEALTHY, huh?

4. Not asserting myself more in high school. I went to the same tiny school my entire life, and by the time we got to high school everyone knew each other way too well, or at least thought they did. It was pretty hard to break out of the mold you'd settled in at the age of eight, and dating felt incestuous. By the time I was in high school there was all these different groups of friends and I didn't really fit into any of them, and I felt so AWKWARD about it. I didn't understand at the time that most people thought of me as "the smart one," or didn't think about me at all. I assumed that not thinking about me was the same as thinking bad things about me, when in reality I could have been a lot closer with multiple people if I had just MADE them think about me.

5. Not opening a high-yield savings account when I graduated from college and sold my car. I ended up spending a lot of that money because I wasn't really earning enough money to pay my expenses (ah, the joys of entry-level positions at DC nonprofits), even with 10 hours of babysitting a week. But in the meantime, before I spent it all, I could have made what would have amounted to quite a bit of spare cash at the time. It would have afforded me a few days off from babysitting, at the very least.

6. Relatedly, not studying more finance and economics in college. I've always been drawn to economics but I only took one econ class in college, and nothing on finance. But I do think all that stuff is so interesting, both micro and macro. And I absolutely love learning about economic markets, and especially emerging markets. I think it's so interesting to look at African economic markets, for example, and how people in Africa spend their money and how the fact that an incredibly large proportion of the population in most African countries are under the age of 15 impacts spending habits and overall economies. I find this stuff fascinating and intuitive and it would be nice to have a bit more of an academic or at least theoretical/historical perspective to apply to all of it.

7. OMG, speaking of bad fashion choices, wearing cut-off too-big men's shorts all summer when I was 14 or 15. And also, OVERALLS in middle school. I cringe just thinking about it.

What about you? Do you have regrets? Or at least poor decisions in your past?