When I was almost sixteen, after looking at one of my close guy friends as he did something across the room and wondering “am I starting to like him more than as a friend?”, I would then think “nah” and spared us both the drama over the next seven years.
I would have made it to my commencement for college graduation, rather than getting fall-down drunk and arrested for public intoxication.
Wow - that was an easy decision.
I’d have changed my college major from political science/international relations (all these years later I’m still not quite sure what got into me there) to English, with a minor in Psychology.
Mind blowing sex isn’t everything. She was fantastic in the sack but there were plenty of warning signs that she was on the wrong side of batshit. After another sweaty bout of monkey sex my brain vapor locked and I asked her to marry me.
The penis won that battle and I got six years of misery.
My first reaction is that I would not attend the college I ended up at, but really that would require having had a whole different outlook throughout all of 12th grade, and I don’t know what else I would have done.
So instead, I’ll say this. It’s freshman year of college. A few days ago an extremely cute boy had, at my request, given me some help with some math homework. I couldn’t tell if he just didn’t like me or was just as shy as I was. A few days after that I ran into him on my way to a different class. He held a door for me and asked if I had started the current round of math homework, and when I said I hadn’t, he said he’d started it but it was really hard and he wasn’t anywhere near finished. I mumbled something about that sucking and went inside and into my class. Some obscene amount of time later* I realized that a clue had just sailed over my head and into low earth orbit. He was really hot, and had I had something going on romantically maybe freshman year would have gone better, or I at least would have had some more fun. So I’d like to shrink away the time it took me to realize what was going on.
*as in weeks. I was seriously clueless.
I would have quit my job in 2003 instead of hanging on for two more years out of a misplaced sense of duty.
The first time I went to Hong Kong, I should have stayed in Hong Kong. I love the place.
I would have grabbed myself about seven years ago, pointed him at my wife, and said, “it’s her. Go get her now instead of wasting five years”. Then I would have gotten off my ass and into grad school so I’d be done by now.
At the age of 21 I had a clear decision to make: doing my own thing and continuing a journey into the world of entertainment, comedy and showbusiness (where I had made a somewhat promising start), or reject that option and get a regular 9-5 job doing something I didn’t really want to do. I succumbed to conventional thinking and took the 9-5 job. It took me about 15 years to undo that mistake and get back on track, doing my own thing and living the way I want to live.
I don’t have any regrets, and I can see the positives that DID come from my choice. I gained a lot of experience that came in very useful later on. But for many reasons, it’s still something I think of as a mistake.