It Should Have Been Different

Regret over the “wrong” decisions can last a lifetime.

My life has two different kinds of “It should have been different.” The first group includes the different things that “should” have happened to me. I should have had different parents. I should have been born into a different era. (Is this why time-travel novels are so popular?)

I can think of many things in this category of things undone and songs unsung, but I accept that life isn’t going to rewind the tape to fulfill my dim fantasies of “ideal” parents or a “perfect” life. I can accept what was.

I save the torture for the “wrong” decisions I made, the ones for which I cannot blame fate, karma, or a wild rotation of the wheel of fortune. I can only blame myself.

And I do.

As I think more deeply about my regret over what I didn’t choose, I recognize that this “it should have been different” scenario should be retitled, “Ishould have been different.” I should have been all-knowing, all-powerful. I should have been able to look along the wavering line of time and space and seen exactly what would result from my choices.

In this vein, I recently decided that my entire life had been a failure. I thought about all the things I did wrong, all the bad choices. I lacked the nails to make this a full-blown crucifixion, but I did plenty of hammering at myself.

I could — and did — name every decision I’d made that drove my life down into the depths of misery. It made an impressive list. If only, I wailed, I had made different decisions. Then —

What would have happened if I’d made different decisions? I tried to imagine a different life, but I couldn’t.

If, for example, I hadn’t gotten married young — which is sometimes one of my favorite decisions to regret — I don’t know how my life would have turned out. While I can follow the twists and turns and the crucial decisions of my lived life, I can’t do the same for an imagined life, no matter how often I’ve told myself I should have been able to do this.

Related posts:

sitting in a cafe alone.. “EVOL” is published by heather.

Cheese or Font is a simple quiz-like game in which you identify 50 names as either a type of cheese or a font style in under 5 minutes. The graphical interface is hard to parse and clunky, with…

Erectile dysfunction is a source of frustration for many men and their partners. Of these, impotence is the most common, followed by early ejaculation. But the list of problems that can affect a…