It’s fine not to have it all figured out.

I think hitting 40 usually comes with serious reflection on the younger years, on what one would have done differently, given a chance–given a do-over with knowledge of what the future held.

I know I’ve been thinking about it extensively. The main things that keep cropping up in my little fantasies of waking up in my preteens with memory of the next almost-30 years are three main areas:

Taking care of my health early on. This means losing weight when it’s easy. Yes, easy. It would have been downright easy to lose weight at 10, 12, 15 versus now. It might have felt like a insurmountable problem then, but knowing what I do now? And not having the injuries I do now? Not to mention there just being LESS of it to start. Fuck, man, send me back. Put me in, coach. I’ll whip that lazy teenager into shape immediately. I had no idea how hard it would get after my body got broken, and now it really IS an almost insurmountable problem.

This also means avoiding birth control, which made things worse and probably gave me my PCOS (not to mention nerve damage and vulvodynia! Ask if incompetent doctors putting the wrong cleanser on when they insert your IUD is right for you!) or at least exacerbated it to the level it is now (debilitating). I would have gotten into seed cycling earlier, because it’s been nothing short of miraculous. And I would have avoided endocrine disruptors as much as humanly possible.

Also…no drinking, no smoking, no drugs. Probably no tattoos or piercings (save maybe the ears), hair dye, or nail polish. Do my best to keep my body from experiencing trauma (tattoos and piercings are trauma, even if it’s trauma for a good reason) and toxins (hair dye & nail polish are big culprits), and try to keep addictive behaviours to a minimum (I will NOT be giving up coffee in this timeline jump).

Oh and obviously I’d avoid the spinal injury if I could. No duh. Though I am well aware it might happen through other means anyway, I’d still do my best to keep my back intact.

Buckling down and focusing on my writing earlier, actually giving it more of my time. Actually, that would probably be the worst part of waking up at ten or thirteen and having to relive my life–rewriting all my books!

Then again I am in the middle of rewriting Chosen of Kore yet again now, so…maybe life as a writer is just lots of rewriting. Maybe that’s my lot.

Anyway, I’d focus on writing my books, and self-pub the second it became possible. Maybe even share chapters on FictionPress or some other serial website early on, to gain a following.

Finding my husband as early as possible (and as wouldn’t get him in trouble) and marrying him immediately.

We’ve been married for 11 years now and the one regret I have is that we didn’t find each other earlier. I’m 40, he’s going to be 45, and having reached 11 years of marriage, 16 of being together, it really puts into stark relief the years we have left. They’ll never be enough.

So if I could have a do-over, with all my memories, I’d try to get into his life as soon as I can. (And by as soon as I can, I mean when I’m 18 because I don’t want him going to jail. Lol.)

(And, obviously, in this little fantasy of a do-over he also gets one and remembers everything…but I have a plan in case he doesn’t. The plan is meet his mom first, who will go “Oh my gods this girl is perfect for my son” and then play matchmaker, and because my husband has a good relationship with his mom it will work perfectly.)

Additionally, I’d try to be better with money. I was really stupid about it in my late teens and early-mid 20s and it didn’t help me at all. I’d probably make sure to get a bunch of Bitcoin back when they were giving it away, because wow is it worth a lot now.

It’s a nice little fantasy–having a do-over now that I’ve figured out what I should have done back then. It’s probably why I love video games; if I fuck up, I can always restart.

But life doesn’t have do-overs like that and we’re playing without a strategy guide. There is no strategy, because it isn’t a game with an end goal.

It just is.

The purpose of life is to live it, and part of that is not having it all figured out.

Yes, even when you’re 40. Even when you’re 50. Sixty. Eighty.

Life is an endless series of lessons, of learning, of figuring some things out only to figure out you really have nothing figured out. The more you know, the less you know, and wherever you go, there you are–and you have to figure out how to be here now.

Nature understands this; it doesn’t try to figure things out, it simply is. The ocean speaks to the moon and waves crash upon the shore and the sea doesn’t have an existential crisis about what it all means, doesn’t need to go on a journey to find itself, to figure out if it even WANTS to make waves crash on the shore.

They just do.

We’re part of nature, of course, but we’ve got them big brains now that make us walk upright and use language and tools and make up things like myths and mercy and love and beauty and religion and tribalism and taxes and sometimes it feels like a miracle but other times it feels monstrous.

But it just is. We are what we are, and if you do try to figure anything out in your life then I recommend you start with trying to understand human nature and humanity, because it will bring much peace to realize we’ve always been these goofy little primates with silly ideas, capable of whimsy and monstrous things in the same breath.

The same DNA that brings us silly graffiti on the walls of Rome and Pompei and a little toy duck and gravestones for our dogs and love poems also brings us war and genocide and murder all the worst parts of us, and facing that reality is the hardest thing one can do but it’s also so, so necessary. No one wants to admit to being capable of monstrous things but we are. Every single one of us.

Every time we improve society to be better, every time we make civilization more civilized, we then adopt this haughty view of the past–look how much better we are than our forebears! we cry, pointing to their many flaws. We, of course, would NEVER be monstrous the way they were!

But in a thousand years, whatever civilization is standing will look at things that we feel are very normal and right and even moral in our society and shudder in disgust, and I can only pray that they afford us some grace when they speak of us, that they remember our shared humanity, that same base code that allows for beauty and ugliness all mingled together.

The Romans didn’t have it all figured out. Neither do we. Individually or collectively.

And of course, the real irony is that you do figure things out on an individual level–about phases of life you’ve already finished. You don’t know what you need to know about your twenties until you’re in your thirties, and so on and so forth.

This is why older people are always giving advice, but the other great irony of being human is that when you’re young, your biology has basically programmed you to feel like you know everything and disregard everything older folk say.

This happens on a societal level, too; every generation thinks it knows better than the one before it, and tears down the walls the previous generation built.

I was like that as a teen and twentysomething, I remember. To be fair, sometimes older folks are fucking idiots and should be disregarded, but other times the advice is solid. Sometimes the walls previous generations put up are useless additions to a building that just make it seem smaller, and other times they’re load-bearing.

Learning when it is the right call to ignore or dismantle takes discernment, and that is something you only learn with time and experience.

So, no, you probably don’t have it all figured out, and you’ll probably spend your entire life trying to figure it out, and that’s fine.

Come sit with me. I don’t have it all figured out either. We can have some tea and watch the rain fall and try to figure things out together.

We probably won’t succeed, but the point of it is in the doing, not the result.