Don't Let That Hold You Back

1

What’s Missing?

Here’s a wild stat: Most people have bigger regrets about the things they didn’t do than the things they did do. Go ahead and google it. It’s true! How about you? Do you have regrets?

With a statistic like that, we’d think that the regrets we carry about what we haven’t done would be the catalyst to GET UP AND DO. Sometimes they are, but often, for me, when my biggest regret has come to mind, it has made me feel embarrassed and small and disappointed in myself, not ready to conquer the world.

I have one main regret in life.

To be clear, I’ve made a lot of mistakes and learned from them. I’ve made decisions and later realized there may have been a better route or a wiser path. I’ve changed my mind and adjusted my course repeatedly.

But I really have only one regret. In the grand scheme of a whole human life, this one may not seem like that big of a deal, but it shaped me. Let me explain. It happened when a smallish decision was cementing something in me that I would later have to take a jackhammer to and bust up.

As an early-­childhood education major at the University of Georgia, I was given the opportunity to study abroad in Italy during my junior year of college. Our entire cohort was offered the chance to student teach for three months in the Italian town of Carpi.

I toiled over the decision.

It felt like an incredible opportunity. I mean, I LOVE PIZZA. When would I ever get such a chance again? A lot of my friends were going, which meant there would be built-­in community. And getting to live in Italy? I felt like I would become very sophisticated by learning Italian and then be that person who, for the rest of my life, would say, “Oh yeah, I used to live in Italy,” every time I saw Parmesan cheese.

But then I started processing all I would be missing if I left. What might happen in Athens, Georgia, that I would regret not being there for?

What if this was the semester I fell in love with someone?

What if my friends in Athens made incredible memories without me?

What if this was the most important semester of my life and I was off in Italy instead?

I didn’t go.

And I regret that.

I tell you this because whenever I get to do a question-­and-­answer session at a speaking event, it seems someone always asks what advice I’d give to a person in their twenties. Now that I’m sturdily in my forties, I have the answers to that question right in my back pocket.

First of all, I say, “Wear your retainers. Your parents already paid for braces once, so just wear your retainers and avoid paying again for braces as an adult. As I did. In my forties.” Now I’m that woman who will wear her retainers, nighttime for a lifetime, until I see Jesus face-­to-­face. (My guess is I won’t have to wear them in heaven, but I’m willing.)

Second, I tell college students what I wish someone would have told me:

Travel abroad.

Take the opportunity.

Want me to tell you about all the memories from that spring semester of my junior year at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia? I HAVE NONE. I don’t remember one important thing from that semester.

Had I lived in Italy? I’d be insufferable with recounting memories of my European life.

I was held back by FOMO (fear of missing out), and as a result, I missed out.

A few other things come to mind when I’m standing in front of a room of friends who are still shaping their lives. But given the chance to help someone avoid carrying the same regret I carry, I tell people to go to the places.

Change your location. Switch up where you are. If the question of what is missing is fuzzy but alive in your mind, a stop at a new coffee shop or a visit to a new city will crystallize what has been blurry before. You will suddenly know profoundly what you previously knew was possibly true. You’ve experienced this before, and so have I. It’s that moment when you’re standing on a street corner you don’t know or driving down a road you’ve never driven before and that question pops into your mind. It’s new, but it isn’t. It’s the clear question that at home was clouded by familiar surroundings. Place matters because places matter.

Place Matters

Until I moved away for college, I lived in the same house in Marietta, Georgia, right next to my grandparents’ house. We literally shared a driveway. I would often run between their house and ours, ride my bike around the pond, play down by the garden, and pick scuppernong grapes from the grapevines right by the gravel driveway.

Then, when I was thirty-­seven, my parents moved out of my childhood home. When they decided to move, I was devastated. Mind you, I had not lived in that house in nineteen years. But for some reason, I was having a really strong emotional reaction to their choice to live in a better house for them.

A counselor friend of mine, Jim Cress, says, “If our reaction is hysterical, it’s historical.” So, I knew there was more there for me than just my parents getting a new street address.

Why am I so sad about a house I haven’t lived in for over half my life?

I sat with my therapist and asked her about this. She told me that place matters. Where things happen matters. That’s when I ­really started paying attention to the places I love.

Now, years later, I know that my counselor was right. For me, place is a powerful force. Place determined both what held me back and what propelled me forward. Besides being the reason for my sadness in “losing” my childhood home, place explains my regret in not going to Italy in college.

In fact, as you’ll see in the chapters to come, place will have a recurring role throughout my story. We’ll cover my move to Nashville in my twenties, my move to Scotland in my thirties, and my move to New York City in my forties.

Each place changed my life. Each city came along at just the right time to invite me to be brave, to risk being new, to build a life beyond what I thought possible for myself. Cities change all the time, but these cities changed me too.

New York City has profoundly affected my life.

New York, New York

I dreamed of moving to New York for twenty years before I did it. During those years, I visited a lot, staying on couches or in guest beds or—­in some very generous cases—­taking over the host’s bed after they kindly offered it to me. Once Mary Kate Morrissey and Ginna Claire Mason were back in their home base of New York, I wanted to go even more. Since I had met them as they came through Nashville on the Wicked: The Musical national tour, they had become two of my dearest friends. Their contracts with the Wicked tour were complete, and they were now back in the city.

For New Year’s Eve of 2022 going into 2023, Mary Kate and Ginna Claire were hired to sing at a fancy party in Midtown Manhattan, and they had an extra ticket for me. So, I flew up there, plopped my stuff down in Meredith’s apartment, another dear friend from this group, and headed to the party.

Between performances, we ate course after course of Italian food, drank espresso martinis, ate bread dipped in oil, and laughed and laughed. Their husbands joined the four of us friends around the table, and we were so at ease.

In the middle of a funny moment, I leaned over to Mary Kate and said, “Gosh, I love being with y’all. I wish I lived here.”

She looked right in my eyes and spoke kindly, “You know, Annie, we’ve been friends for a lot of years. And everything you say you are going to do, you do. Except this.”

I guess she had heard me say a version of that sentence before. And in that moment, she gave me a very generous invitation to be a woman of my word. I could either quit saying that particular thing or start living differently.

I flew home two days later and immediately started the conversation with people on my board of directors about what it might look like for me to spend a little time in 2023 in New York City. Just a month, I thought. That would be enough.

How different would my life be without that one conversation?

A sob catches in my throat just thinking about it.

Had I not been at that table with Mary Kate, had I not become best friends with her over the years after I met her, had I not met her backstage after the Wicked performance in Nashville, had I not been right there, right then, how different would my life be?

Thanks be to God.

What a gift Mary Kate Morrissey is in my life.

What a gift New York City is in my life. It has given me opportunities I never would have had any other way—­like going to a Broadway read-­through.