No Regrets
Written for Ethics and Intercultural Leadership at The University of Oklahoma - Dr. Fogel - Spring 2023
No regrets. It may sound cliché as a twenty-something college student but that is my personal moral code. To me it is the concept that life is full of events, memories, experiences, emotions, and ups and downs. Life is like a rollercoaster, the slow climb to the peak of happiness to eventually drop down into negative feelings. Many rollercoasters share another common theme with life, they only move forward. This idea of moving forward is where I draw my idea of no regrets. Every experience I have had in my lifetime, every connection I have made has shaped the person I am today. To this day, the idea of regretting an action, "what if...?" has always been a concept I couldn't grasp. Why should I regret things I can't change. In my eyes there is either regret, or acceptance and my only option is acceptance. I would rather learn from something that went wrong and use it to become a better person. I have had some amazing experiences over the course of twenty-eight years but the worst experiences I have had led to this idea of thinking.
Showing the contrast of experiences in my life paints a picture of a life with truly no regrets. The highlights of my life to this point come from my time in the Air Force. As an Airborne Surveillance Technician my primary job was flying on the United States Air Force E-3 Sentry. Think of this aircraft as a commercial airline jet you would fly to your favorite vacation destination with some heavy modifications. The 'lobes' as we called them where your ten-year old beat-up suitcase would spend its journey was full of computer, radar, and radio equipment. Instead of a hundred seats filling the cabin we had forty. Sixteen of those seats accompanied by a metal desk with a built-in computer, that we used to perform surveillance, reconnaissance and intelligence missions. My job specifically was to use our radar to identify and keep track of any aircraft that was not a part of the United States military, or allied partners. While deployed this meant that the safety of every fighter, bomber or surveillance aircraft partially rested in my hands. Failure to properly identify another aircraft could lead to someone with a wild trigger finger could shoot down the wrong person, as seen in the 1994 Black Hawk shootdown over northern Iraq, which led to one individual on the aircraft tried in a court-martial. This was a lot of responsibility for a kid fresh out of high school, but I was having the time of my life. I have met some amazing people from across the world as I had the opportunity to travel quite frequently. The best times really started in 2017, at this time I was recommended to become an instructor within my career field. This gave me the chance to teach both in the air, and in a classroom setting. Nothing brought me more joy than taking the lessons I had learned, the knowledge I gained, and curating it into little nuggets of information for new recruits. Now the highlights in this painting have some very dark shadows that show the tenebrism of my life.
These shadows are significantly stronger in their effect on my idea of no regrets and show the idea doesn't always work. The shadows crept in at the age of four in 1998. My mother and father went in wildly separate directions. My father a hardworking man, and my mother a free spirit who couldn't be bound. I watched my father work his way through fourteen years of carpentry, start college in his thirties, and eventually become a successful software developer. I watched my mother kidnap me in first grade, perform CPR on her lover who had overdosed on pain killers, force me to lie to the police, taken away in handcuffs, and spend 90% of her six-hundred dollars a month on drugs and alcohol. The latest of these shadows started July of 2020. Usually, marriage is a joyous event, but this is when my relationship was enveloped by the shadows. She was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, which for her meant the contrast in life was always one hundred percent. The color grey did not exist in her brain. As the closest person in her life, I was either the highlight of her life, or the worst person in the entire world. For someone with this mental health disorder, the smallest event can lead to an explosion of anger, hatred, resentment and ultimately emotional violence. As time went on the ratio of light to dark exponentially shifted until there was nothing enjoyable. As time went by the emotional abuse from her came daily, as I struggled to stay afloat, we tried everything imaginable to help work through her issues. January of 2020 was her first suicide attempt, and when I learned I didn't actually know how to perform CPR. The words "I wish you didn't save me", will be forever stuck in the crevices of my mind. "Mr. Tellez, I'm sorry to tell you, your wife is no longer with us" hit me at full force as it came through the phone on the 8th of March 2020. There is not a happy ending to this part of the story, as this day would be her final, and successful suicide attempt. Acceptance is one of the stages of grief, but in a lot of cases it is joined at the hip with guilt. This guilt is the one thing that has failed my idea of no regrets. The thoughts of "What could I have done better?" and "Could I have saved her?", flowed through my mind as fluid as oil in a hot pan. Almost three years later I am still occasionally struck with those feelings of guilt, but as a whole I still embody the idea of accepting what has happened in the past.
The past twenty-eight years of painting my own picture of the world has its fair share of shadows and highlights. Some days it feels like the shadows are taking over, and some days the highlights are as bright as the sun when it wakes me up on the weekends. Either way I see this painting as complex and beautiful. Learning from experiences and accepting there is nothing I can do to change them now has been the driving force that leads me to take the next step each time. I could sit and let the thoughts of what I could have done better spiral out of control but for me that is not an option. The slow climb out of the darkness, out of the low points to reach that eventual peak. The anticipation of when the next drop is going to come. Just like I enjoy riding rollercoasters, I can say that I have truly enjoyed this wild ride of life. They are called thrill rides for a reason, and I am thrilled to see where this journey takes me, good or bad.
