Acceptance and Forgiveness

There are so many times I time traven in my head back to when I was applying for college. I watch myself apply to seemingly cool campuses with rigorous academics without knowing what I want to study. I choose a school simply because it offers an internship program—seems practical. I look through the list of majors to decide what to study and feel an immense pull to study film. Cue the conflict between my need to express myself and my need to feel safe that seems unmendable. I choose the “safe” choice: computer science.

This series of choices seals in my fate of years of misery, self-questioning, and health issues. Regret, regret, regret.

Who the hell made those decisions? I often wonder when sitting in front of my computer wondering how much more work I need to do before I can call it quits.

It was me. My heart and my head were just fractured from one another, and my head won.

Would things have been better if I’d gone with my passion? Probably not. In fact, it might have turned out worse. I know enough now to realize that no matter what I chose to study, I would have had to heal a lot of things inside of me. Choosing a career in tech allowed me to eventually get to the point where I realized that I can’t determine my worth from what I do, that I need to heal the fractures between my head and my heart if I’m going to make better choices, and that I can trust my intuition and the powerful guidance it gives. I’m still working on integrating these lessons, but I’m not even sure I would have been open to them in the first place if I was absorbed with hustling and grinding to succeed at my “dream job.” I either would have stayed entranced by the illusion that I just needed to work a little harder to prove myself or I would have burned out hard. Probably both. So the way things turned out was a blessing even though it came with a lot of grief.

Knowing that doesn’t stop the grief, though. Nor does it stop the resentment that comes with it. It’s hard not to see this period of my life as wasted time. If only I had just known what I know now, I could be so much further along.

That’s where acceptance and forgiveness come in. Because I didn’t know better. What happened in the past happened, for better or worse. I can’t change it, no matter how many times I time travel in my mind. So accepting that and then forgiving myself allows me to move forward and choose better now that I do know better.

After all, that’s the journey of being human. You act in one way until you learn a better way. Then you shift direction and make better choices until you learn an even better way. It’s an ever-evolving path of learning and growth with no end. All I can do is keep walking down it and stay open to whatever is just around the corner.