make peace with your unlived life
Over coffee yesterday, I was listening to a friend despondently talking about the wrong choices she thinks she made. She wished she never studied English literature and went for a rigorous degree, like STEM. She wished she never quit her old job - "would have I made double my salary if I stayed?". She mourned the person she was, and how some of her choices has moulded her life in ways she never anticipated.
I listened empathetically - something I am known to do. How tormenting her thought process was, I thought. A perpetual cycle of anguish, regret. On a whim, I comforted her, telling her that this is her life, that, sometimes, there are no right or wrong choices. It just a choice. A Preordained path? Fate? - but this is the life that was written for you. We need to make peace with the fact that we cannot alter time, that we made our choices based on what we knew back then.
Yet again, sometimes I wish I took by my own advice. Our conversation made realize I spent quite a lot of time ruminating over the past, too - how would I be if I never suffered during childhood? How would have my life been if I pursued my art instead of STEM, a degree I was pressured to do? What would have happened if I never left the country I grew up in?
To a certain degree, it is healthy to introspect over the past: If what I perceived was a wrong choice, how do I make a better choice that would make me happier? If we take these ostensibly "poor choices" as lessons for the future, I think such reflection could be actually productive. I think we need to learn how to make peace with an unlived life. This is a phrase I picked up from a essay that I highly recommend reading, especially if you are currently suffering from an identity crisis. How do we make peace with what could have been real?
I am trying to acknowledge that I did the best I could with the resources I had at the time. So did you. You're not ahead of anybody and you're not behind anyone. You're exactly where you are, where you need to be.