There Are No Do-overs

There’s this thing that happens when you play certain types of video games. I’m thinking of Pokemon-style games where you collect characters and build them up in different ways or Farmville-style games where you develop a virtual dollhouse. The ones I’ve played are Merge Dragons and Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes, but there are plenty of similar games. There’s no one way forward, so everyone’s game experience is different.

Oh wow, that sounds an awful lot like life. Get me, with all the foreshadowing and stuff.

So the thing that happens is that people will play the game for about a year or so - long enough to really learn what you’re doing and to see all the mistakes you made along the way. And then they think about maybe restarting the game completely, throwing away all the progress they’ve made to that point. Because they want to do it right this time.

Because of perfectionism, of course. Even when there’s no actual one, perfect way to play the game.

Some people will figure out how to play the game under a separate account so they can have it both ways. And I suppose some people really do throw away all their progress and start over. The ones that post online, asking more experienced players if they should do it, will be immediately talked out of it.

Now, we can’t hit the reset button on our lives, but I still kinda feel that way about my 20s. I made a lot of choices that I wouldn’t make now. Some were flat out bad choices and others just took me in a direction I didn’t necessarily want to go.

My love life, my career, where I lived, and how I spent my free time in my 20s - none of these things went the way I wanted them to and it was mostly (if not all) because of my own choices. Oops.

Obviously we don’t get a do-over on our lives. Someday, someone will invent an immersive video gaming experience where you can do just that. Which would be helpful for therapy and self discovery and possibly disastrous for society as a whole. But for now, we’ll have to settle for imagination.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve directed my daydreams towards what my life would’ve been/would be like if I’d made different choices. Part of that is related to the novel I’m writing - the main character started as Me Who Made Different Choices. I quickly realized that the Actual Me couldn’t have possibly made those choices. My previous experiences made me who I was. To create a character who could make those different choices, I had to give her a different past, different experiences, and even some different personality traits to make the plot possible.

Which is pretty vindicating in some ways. I went from thinking that I made the choices I did because I was a fool to realizing that it was because I wasn’t able to make “better” decisions. And let’s face it, our life choices are limited by the options available to us. Your options are limited by circumstances, and some options don’t even seem to be options at all.

Aside from the novel, I conducted a thought experiment that you might want to try. I’ve imagined a few different scenarios - 23 year old me choosing a different career path, or making healthier romantic choices. I discovered that several of those scenarios still led to a happy version of me, although with a very different personality. I don’t even know if I’d like those other versions of me. Those other versions of me could like themselves, but they and I wouldn’t necessarily be friends.

Which is OK.

Just as there are many ways to play and succeed at certain video games, there are many many paths to contentment. I really don’t mind that I’m me and not one of these imaginary alternate versions of me. And I don’t think they’d mind not being me.

The point is, there is no perfect way to live your life. There isn’t even only one pleasant way.

Not that I’m done with kicking myself for doing certain things and not doing others. I’m a recovering perfectionist, not an ex-perfectionist. It’s probably best that I’m not trying to do this whole anti-perfectionism thing perfectly.

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