Reading this blog is a bit of a time capsule (more than a bit, if I’m really honest). It captures the innocence of growing up: moving to NYC, traveling the world, romances run wild, and reckoning with harder themes like queerness, trauma, and even death.

As I approach my birthday, I'm acutely aware of all of the lives I left to live this one. The balance and gravity of each life sit pensively on my mind and heart. Older now, time seems more finite. There is a reckoning that comes into play that wasn't conscious before — the moment when you cross over from then into now. There, and then, undeniably here.

As I sat with my therapist, she recounted how it's impossible to know with certainty if we made "the right" choice. I feel a bit like Jo from Little Women, who, through reflective, mournful, and angry sobs, recounts her "throwing away of perfectly good marriage proposals." Jo ultimately became a great writer who found independence and love. But it wasn't without growing pains or watching peers’ milestones sprout up around her, making her question her choices when the world she was constructing didn't go as planned.

There's the life given to you, and then there are the lives you choose.

Creating enough momentum to sail forward into a new life is 75% of the battle. Like a maze, it can be hard to tell whether you're in the old story or the new. It's only with great distance from where you started that the magnitude of growth becomes apparent. I threw away so many good metaphorical marriage proposals for a shot — a consistent shot — at following an echo in the dark: honesty, love, what I would've called authenticity. Today, my life is quieter, simpler, and more peaceful. Isn't that what I always wanted?

But it begs the question: is this life worth that cost? The burden of the losses endured? The price of being true to oneself? Over time, promises that aren't of the soul wither and lose their shine, even those ripe at the onset. They don't hold up under the toll of what's truly desired, no matter how much loss — even of faith — one endures to arrive at that level of honesty.

The harder truth is this: it's so often both. The good feeling of reaching the summit alongside the bittersweet realization it took ten years to arrive — and the awareness of all that was sacrificed along the way. Or realizing that what you see from 5,000 feet up isn't what you saw at basecamp, and wow, the choices you'd have made if you could have seen this far.

Sometimes it's not a matter of whether it's the right path — it's whether I will regret not taking this road for the rest of my life. For all the lives I question not living, I know that what I had to do, and the life that blossomed around those musts, was non-negotiable. Everything else was a tradeoff for that truth.

I share this because I believe the most strategic thing you can do is tell the truth. In work and in life.

Past Meets The Future and Meaningful Regret

There's the life given to you, and then there are the lives you choose.