I am nearing the point in my life where I can confidently speak about the past. The point where hindsight starts being 20-20, and I can speak of my regrets with conviction. I have been thinking lately of what my regrets are, and the biggest of them is….drumroll please….that I did not wear crop-tops in college.
Now, my reasons for not wearing crop tops at the time were twofold. Firstly, this was when I was 19 and I believed that the less of my body I revealed, the less likely I was to be a victim of objectification or whatever forms of harrassment were being dished out on that day. Well, I am older now and know that objectifiers will do it even beneath layers of clothes. If I had known this at the time, I would have worn crop tops since it was going to happen anyway. No amount of modesty could have saved me from that staff member (story for a less sober day). It was going to happen anyway.
I also didn’t wear crop tops because, believe it or not, I really thought I was fat. 2026 me is rolling on the floor laughing. In my very early twenties, I convinced myself I was fat, and my disgusting folds and layers had to be kept hidden from the world lest they start a riot. First of all, I wasn’t fat. I mean, I have never been a skinny girl, and you can tell just by looking at me that I never turn down dessert.
But I wasn’t “you are too monstrous to be seen in clothes you like” size. Let’s take a second and say, hypothetically, that I was a hundred sizes bigger than the size that I wanted to be. What then? What would actually stop me from wearing a crop top? Not the government. Maybe my parents, but I had left them two hours away for this very reason. So I could wear crop tops and make questionable decisions while dressed in my favourite crop top.
In hindsight, I should have worn that crop top, and I still could. My aversion to the crop top had nothing to do with me. It had everything to do with internalising things that were not my business. “It will ward off predators” It won’t. The only thing that wards off a predator is a predator that doesn’t want to predate. “I don’t want to make people uncomfortable with my exposed belly” Who doesn’t have a belly? Who doesn’t know I have one? What could they possibly think is beneath my shirt? Surely they know there has to be a belly and a belly button somewhere. Where is the scandal? These are so easy to rationalise now, but I was a kid, and my decision was an ironic combination of precociousness and naivety.
My favourite thing about growing up is realising just how wrong I was about a lot of things. I might even go so far as to say I was wrong about exactly everything. But growth also reminds you how inconsequential that wrongness is today. There is really nothing to regret. There’s a time in my life when I thought “you’re not like other girls” was a compliment. Aphuuu🤢. But we grow and we learn. And part of that learning is acknowledging that you can’t regret your past selves because they would not have led you to your present self.
This, I suppose, is the beauty of hindsight. Looking back and realising the only thing you would change is your college wadrobe. I could have worn crop tops every day for the 4 years I was at that school and I would still end up here. Not here as some abstract idea, but here, on this day, writing this to you. Because in the end, we never truly regret the big things. The jobs we quit, the relationships we leave, and the faiths we take a break from. We never regret these in the grand scheme. It’s always the little things we regret; hairstyles (I lie awake many-a-night thinking about that ginger bob that I had in December 2016), going to bad restaurants, spending two and a half hours watching Tenet because of a boy🫣.
Perhaps then this is a reminder that even the big things are not that deep-they begin, they end. Siyadabula, siyathunga (need to go back to watching Moja Love). In the grand scheme, things sort themselves out and in the end all we regret are the crop tops we didn’t wear in college.
