Regret

Here is the fantasy in its most seductive form: you wake up in your twenty-two-year-old body with everything you know now. Every mistake you’ve made, every silence that should have been words, every door you walked through and every door you didn’t — all of it available as hindsight. What would you change? I ran this exercise on my own life. Seriously, not rhetorically. I picked moments — the ones that still have weight, the ones that show up in the three-in-the-morning inventory. And each time I tried to intervene, I discovered the same thing: the moment I wanted to fix was not self-contained. The person I became was introduced by someone I only met because of a party I almost didn’t attend because of an argument that happened because of the decision I now want to undo. The love that shaped me most was downstream of a failure I would have prevented. The work I am proudest of came from a rejection that, at the time, felt definitive. ...