If I Could Have a Do-Over
The gnawing pang of wanting to change the past because hindsight is a 20/20 bitch.
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
― Søren Kierkegaard
I have a sporadic but monumental problem of living in the past. I can’t help it. I know we’re supposed to live in the present because the ink of the past is dry and what not but — I can’t. I sometimes find myself falling down the rabbit hole of ‘shoulda, coulda, woulda’ where I think of what could have been if I had just followed my gut in high school.
I wish I could have a do-over. Not necessarily to right the wrongs but to wipe the slate clean completely and choose an entirely different path where I was brave enough to follow my heart.
At the tender age of 17, I made the catastrophic mistake of listening to the acrimonious adults in my life instead of forging my own path. I was seeking approval. This is weird now 17 years later because I make it my life’s mission to subvert societal norms but, there I was seeking validation and approval from the adults in my life. I was an overachiever and one of the insufferable aspects of an overachiever is the need for validation.
At that time, I was struggling with which career path I should take. No one ever gave me advice about living life first through a gap year to find out what made my heart sing. I was only 17 after all and that is a very young age to decide what the rest of my life would look like. Expectations were high in my family. Which is the problem with Caribbean families. We’re only expected to choose a career from a prescribed list of ones that make money but tend to take years of mental anguish studying.
My immediate family expected me to become a doctor because of some childhood musing and my ability to navigate WebMD and narrow down everyone’s symptoms. I was an autodidact at a very young age since I always had an incessant curiosity and an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. Which meant I was good at every subject in school and thus each of my teachers felt I should go down a certain career path.
“The past is never where you think you left it.”
― Katherine Anne Porter
The summer before my senior year of high school I began to narrow down the careers that matched my interests and talents. Psychology, Medicine, Journalism, and Writing were the contenders. Secretly though all I wanted to do was write and live by my pen in a very romantic Jane Austen sort of way.
As you can imagine, at such a young age I was having a hard time deciding so in my teenage mind asking the adults I looked up to and trusted was the best way to make a decision. I also had a knack for learning from other people’s experiences and mistakes so I could shortcut or avoid disappointments and heartaches. This made me believe that asking adults working in some of these fields was the wisest decision I could make as a teenager, but I didn’t account for jaded adulthood and career choice bitterness that many adults feel after a time. Thus following their advice lead to crushed dreams.
I spoke to my aunt first, she’s a psychologist and works at the government ran Asylum. I began something like this “Auntie, I’m interested in psychology and was wondering what you thought about that is a potential career path.”
Immediately she warned me against it. She said Psychology was basically a thankless job, that pays little in our country and leaves you mentally and emotionally exhausted. She went out of her way to make me understand that it wasn’t a viable option. I remember being surprised at her visceral reaction. While now as an adult I am better able to understand when people respond from regret and bitterness of their life choices at the time it was not clear to me. She felt as if she was saving me from going down the route she went. Fair enough I suppose.
“The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind.”
― Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss
I still ended up taking Psychology freshman year of University just to see if it was still a path I wanted to take. It was not. Perhaps though I approached the class with a built-in prejudice because my aunt planted a seed in my mind a-la inception and I allowed it to affect how I saw the course. Later in life, I would regret not exploring psychology further. Another aunt suggested I study journalism because of my personality. I always wanted to write for a major magazine it was another secret dream but everyone else kept telling me I should study medicine.
I decided to speak to my guidance counselor and ask her advice. I respected her in a way I never respected most adults. She was an erudite and an autodidact herself and I always appreciated the way she crafted her words in speech. So, for the first time, I admitted to an adult that I wanted to be a writer. Again, almost immediately my dreams were dashed, much like how the Mountain threw Qyburn during the penultimate episode of Game of Thrones (sorry if you don’t get that vivid reference), she told me writing was not a viable career path.
She then went on to list all the reasons why writing won’t make me any money. Looking back on it now I know she was looking at writing from a very limited lens. All she thought about was how hard it is to get published without considering the many paths to writing as a successful career choice.
Now that I’m older and was once a teacher, I can see how I would give advice differently to any young impressionable student full of hope because that was once what I wanted to hear. All I wanted her to say to me was that I should consider pathways to writing like newspaper or magazine journalism and work on being a novelist outside of my day job. Or study a liberal arts degree and glean everything I can to help augment my writing career, maybe minor or double major in Journalism. Instead, she crushed those dreams and told me I should be a doctor.
Yes, I’ve managed to find my way to being a paid professional writer thanks to falling into Freelancing almost by accident and working my way up the Medium Partner Program ladder but it makes me think of all the wasted time when I could have been enjoying a fulfilling writing career straight after University.
“The past is always tense, the future perfect.”
― Zadie Smith
If I could magically have a do over, I would have never chosen Canada as the place to study. I would have gone to an HBCU in the US and studied Psychology with a minor in Women’s Studies. I would have tried to fit journalism in their somehow. I also think of the path of studying a double major in Journalism and Women’s Studies with a psychology minor. If I had dared to try then I would have gone to Brown or Sara Laurence and studied Liberal Arts with a minor in Journalism. And I would have written after college. I would have gotten internships at magazines or newspapers and scrapped my way from the bottom of the barrel to the top. I would have honed my writing skills much sooner and made the connections I needed to thrive.
By now perhaps I would have published a book or two and maybe even started my own magazine. I would have still ended up on Medium because I would have wanted to be relevant and trendy. I’d live in New York, flit around Art Social circles and have the usual adult problems. But I think I would have had fulfillment a lot earlier.
“You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor
I dream of these alternate realities more often than I should care to admit. Last night while discovering and then watching The Bold Type on Hulu, I began to think about it again. The writing isn’t that great, nor is the acting but the show speaks to me in ways The Devil Wears Prada, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, and Sex and the City did. They feature women in major writing roles for magazines or major publications. Women living the dream I still have. If I could have a do-over it would look a lot like that maybe.
I’m working daily on being satisfied with my life decisions. I’ve had a colorful life thus far and it’s lent to my growth in such a meaningful way but every so often I struggle with what could have been if I had just been bold enough to keep my dreams to myself and follow the beat of my own drum. If I had learned earlier that validation was not necessary then maybe I wouldn’t have had the struggles I had in University or the exhausting vacillation I had trying to work towards becoming a doctor.
Do you ever feel this way?
“When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche
I gave up on being a doctor and everyone was shocked and more than anything disappointed. I know I let my parents down and my grandmother especially but I realized I had to be true to myself. I admit that living in the past or wishing to rewrite it is folly. But I think it’s a game my mind likes to play when it’s idle to torture me. Actively though I’m beginning to tell my mind to just stop it and realize that there is still time to forge a new writing path and every day, I am working toward doing just that.