Regret

You can be sorry about something and not regret it.

– Taylor Jenkins
Evelyn Hugo in The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

Not the only fictional character with some wisdom in my collection, Evelyn Hugo has lived a long life full of hard decisions. This quotation is about setting and keeping boundaries, about hard decisions that you wish you did not have to make, about making a choice when there are no good options.

I’ve done this, most obviously when I came out and had no choice but to live as myself, despite the immediate and future consequences. Those consequences made me sad, but I will never regret them.