Recently someone I’m connected with on social media posed a question that made me think.  It was a simple question, posed frequently by many over the course of time, but on this day, it caused me to pause my scrolling.  I jotted down the question, and didn’t add a comment, because I knew this was something that I was going to ruminate on, and a quick answer wasn’t forthcoming.  The question that was posed was if you were to do it all again (life), what would you do differently?

The reason this caused me to pause is that I used to spend a lot of time thinking about this question.  It was as if maybe one single action in my timeline could correct any pain or failure I had gone through and could change the trajectory my life had taken.  What was that pivotal point?  Or was my life the accumulation of a series of missed opportunities and bad decisions?  Or maybe I was just dealt a bad hand and couldn’t play my way out of it.

When I was in college, I used to have grand ideas for my life.  I wasn’t 100% sure what those grand things I was going to accomplish were – but I was going to do them ALL!  I was going to be a force to be reckoned with.  As my husband pointed out, I was driven to be CEO.  CEO of what I wasn’t sure, but I was going to be CEO in my own mind.  So, it was an earth-shattering experience, when my mind didn’t cooperate quite according to plans in my senior year.  The diagnosis I experienced felt catastrophic because it decimated all my plans.  I ended up hospitalized a few times and had to withdraw and complete my course work remotely.

For years, I felt robbed by the universe of my destiny.  I relished in this victimhood.  I embraced this concept that the universe had transpired against me with great zeal.  I poured myself many a drink with this reasoning as the impetus.  

Later on down the road, I liked to play a little game when I was looking for jobs.  I’d pull up a job site on my browser, plug in my zip code and a search radius.  I liked to call this game “what should my major in college have been?”.  I can guarantee you it was never English, which is what my degree is in.

Like I said, I USED to spend a lot of time thinking about what I should have done differently.  However, the futility of spending too much time worrying about what could have been or should have been dawned on me several years ago when I was in the process of making some major life changes.  I used to spend so much time in the past, asking “What ifs”.  It was one of my best tools for beating myself up or making myself feel less than.  I was very much the glass half empty sort.  I could rattle off so many mistakes and so many areas of my life where I felt I had been wronged or short-changed.

So, what caused my shift in perspective away from this detrimental self-reflection that used to suffocate me?  One of the biggest challenges to this way of thinking was my realization that in order to reach the exact point where I was today, I had to experience EVERYTHING that I had been through.  And just as monumental a realization was the change to the lens I was looking at life through.  I tried looking at everything that had happened to me so far, the good, the bad – with an attitude of gratitude.

I’ve had people throw this whole “Gratitude” concept abundantly at me.  I used to greet this word with a HUGE eye roll.  Someone would say, “Make a gratitude list,” and the indignant smirk that would flash across my face probably said where I stood on the whole gratitude thing.  I didn’t really believe in the face of the tragic circumstances I had been dealt by cruel life (I was very melodramatic for quite a while) that gratitude would dig me out of the immense hole I was stuck in.

I’ve had a change of heart of late, for which I am extremely grateful.  Given my previous state of self-pity and self-loathing, gratitude may have been a hard concept for me to embrace.  It comes more readily now that I have had some practice.  Sometimes it takes a concerted effort, but most times I just need to be conscious of my attitude and in the moment.  One of the ways I learned to see things with gratitude was to embrace new experiences, both positive and negative, as growth opportunities.  If I do decide to go back in time and revisit negative spaces of my life, I try to do so with the idea of looking for anything I learned from it.  Sometimes it took a lot of repeated failures to finally gain a lesson.  Sometimes it took an excruciating amount of pain.  But in learning something from my past, even years later I got to where I am today.

I’ve also realized I can be grateful for little things.  When I am in a melancholy mood, I focus on where I’m at and what I am doing in that moment and look for just one little thing I can be grateful for.  When I fail, I focus on being grateful on having the ability to learn from my mistakes.  As a perfectionist, this has been something I continuously have to remind myself.  I used to carry a gratitude list with me in case I started to go down a negative path and needed to remind myself all was not lost.

As for how I would change my life if I had to do it over again, I’ve realized I wouldn’t.  I’ve done a lot of work trying to get to a place where I love and accept myself.  I’m ok with who I am today.  Am I perfect?  NO.  Will I ever be?  NO. But I’m ok with that.  I think it’s part of my charm.