One of the hardest things about a question like this is deciding which moment to choose, because life offers no shortage of scenes you would gladly rewrite if time ever handed you a clean page.
Of course, it never does.
You do not get to go back and fix the moment when you froze, stayed silent, hesitated, or simply chose the safest exit. All you can really do is recognize what that moment taught you—sometimes the wrong lesson—and try not to keep living by it.
For me, one of those moments goes all the way back to eighth grade, late in 1980.
The year before, in seventh grade, I had quit football just before the season began. When I came back out for the team in eighth grade, the coaches made sure I knew they had not forgotten it. They openly called me a quitter, and not in any joking way. Now that I have spent years in classrooms myself, I know there is a huge difference between playful teasing and public humiliation. What they were doing belonged firmly in the second category.
One of the starting players—let’s call him Tom—already did not like me, and I have always believed the coaches’ attitude gave him permission to take that further.
After football season ended and Christmas break approached, Tom enlisted several offensive linemen to help make my life miserable in the hallways. They would spot me, pick up speed, call out my name, yell that they were coming to get me—and I ran.
And I mean I ran.
One day I ran all the way to a nearby private school just to get away from them.
For years I wondered whether memory had exaggerated that fear. Had I built it into something larger than it really was? Recently I found a note I had written after changing schools, and it confirmed what I felt then: I was terrified. Miserable enough that by the end of that school year, I left town entirely and moved six hours away to live with my dad in the Florida Panhandle.
That was my inaction.
I let fear make every decision.
And if I am honest, what I wish I had done differently is not necessarily what would look best in a guidance counselor’s office.
Part of me wishes I had simply stopped running, turned around, looked Tom in the eye, and made it clear that if he wanted a fight, he was going to get one—even if I knew I would lose it.
Would that have ended well? Probably not. I might have been suspended. I might have been bruised, bloodied, maybe worse.
But I also suspect the stalking would have stopped, because bullies often depend on momentum, and momentum changes the moment someone refuses to keep retreating.
The deeper problem is that running worked—at least in the short term. I escaped. But it also taught me something I later had to unlearn: that retreat was always the safest answer.
That lesson stayed around longer than Tom did.
And maybe that is the real regret—not one hallway, not one bully, not one miserable winter—but the fact that fear taught me a pattern I carried for years before I learned better.
You cannot go back and face the person from forty-five years ago.
But you can refuse to keep obeying lessons fear taught you when you were fourteen.
