Mistakes Were Made

Mistakes. Lots of them. Year after year, I’ve made progressively shittier choices. I’ve spent the majority of my life acting and thinking in really dumb ways. I allowed myself to become fixated on what was beyond my reach, rather than appreciating the actual possibilities right in front of me. I was so consumed by what I wasn’t that I wasted what I could have been.

Of course, there were reasons for all of it. I didn’t understand then what I know now. If circumstances had been even slightly different, it all might have turned out another way. I might have lived a worthwhile life.

The choices, the mistakes, were mine alone. All entirely my fault. Most people, given my opportunities, would have built a fine life for themselves. But most people are not me. They do not have my weaknesses, or my strengths. Most people are not vulnerable in the ways that I am, to the same degree.

I cannot claim mastery of the particular circumstances that allowed the worst in me to flourish. Or even of the whirlwind of thoughts and emotions that make self-destructive behavior seem entirely sensible day after day. My thoughts and feelings arise, entirely unbidden within me. I do not choose to think each thought. It just is. And that thought then becomes a choice.

True responsibility is a forward looking attitude. I cannot change my mistakes. I cannot pretend that they were somehow independent of the context in which they were made, purely chosen outside space and time. I cannot claim the many factors that led me to make them – they stretch back far beyond me.

What matters is that I learn from them, and try to correct them, going forward. But how to do that, when I’ve missed out on so much of what goes towards making a normal, functional adult. There isn’t a version of me going forward from this point that is healthy, or complete. My mind, my sense of self, is trapped in the past.

I’ve allowed myself to become something I can no longer show to others. So now there’s no way I can experience the acceptance I longed for as a child. Which leaves me trapped with this feeling of inadequacy and regret. And on the cycle goes………