If you could go back to any point in your life and alter any and every detail that you wish, would you do it?
If you said yes, good for you. I'm not here to say you're wrong. I'm not here to convince you otherwise. I'm here to offer my view and why, as a sober, broke, college student (one who is looking at not only a 5th, but a 6th year of classes in order to graduate), I would much rather leave things the way I've let them play out.
Because hindsight is truly 20/20.
If I could go back in time to any point in my life, any point at all, I would go back to August 27th, 2013, at approximately eight in the evening EST. I'd find my way to room 1609 in Kirwan Tower, part of the Kirwan-Blanding dorm complex at the University of Kentucky, and I'd sit down and tell 18 year old me about everything that will happen to him over the next three years, two months, and twenty-something odd days. Every big fight. Every yelling match with his parents. Every relationship. Every failed class and exam. Every friendship and every girl he will text that will end up not being the right girl for him.
I'll tell him about the patchwork trip via a hitchhike, MegaBus, and stranger's van he will take in 109 days to Milwaukee to finally enter the world of DCI (it'll actually end horribly).
I'll tell him about the faithful day exactly 22 months down the road where he'll put his leg between a visual tech's somewhere in Indiana and tear his meniscus in two.
I'll tell him that exactly three years from the day, he'll be living in West Virginia, attending a university he hasn't heard of yet, having left behind not one but two girls who probably could've made him incredibly happy.
And I'll tell him to do it all the same way I did.
Because he deserves to learn as much as I did.
Wanting to change what you did holds you back. It causes regression of the individual and keeps you from living a truly amazing life. We can want for more. We can long for something, or someone, we hoped we had done. But we should never wish to change the past. Our previous actions make us who we are and shape what we will one day be.
A very creative individual I mentioned in a past article came up with the term 'alazia.' The fear that you're no longer able to change. A fear which is unfounded. Some people almost have a phobia of this construct, terrified that a 9 to 5 in a cardboard cubicle contained within a building older than our parents is where they're destined to live out the last 20-40 years of their lives.
But it's silly, don't you think? Because 20 years ago, I was barely 2, living in Alaska, awaiting the first of two younger brothers. Yugoslavia was still a country, which is very strange to think about. 101 Dalmatians hadn't hit theaters and Internet Explorer had yet to enrage millions of Americans with its inadequacy. So why should I think 20 years from now I'll be living the current status-quo? I don't.
My favorite author is now someone I have outlived. She once wrote, "We're so young. We're so young. We're twenty-two years old. We have so much time. There's this sentiment I sometimes sense, creeping in our collective conscious as we lie alone after a party, or pack up our books when we give in and go out - that it is somehow too late. That others are somehow ahead. More accomplished, more specialized. More on the path to somehow saving the world, somehow creating or inventing or improving. That it's too late now to BEGIN a beginning and we must settle for continuance, for commencement."
She's been gone for a little over 4 years now. I wonder where she would be. What her 26 year old self would be like. Would she still be throwing parties? Would she be married? Would she have given in to the social pressure to have kids in a world that doesn't want more people?
I have nostalgia for the future, and it's a curse if there ever was one. Because I wonder what I'll be like at 26. In the far off year of 2020. Will I have found the woman of my dreams? Will we be married, expecting our first child? Will we be throwing parties so loud and out of control that our neighbors have to call the police to complain? Will we be best friends?
I would like to think so. And I would like future me to keep that a secret for now.
