[kgin]

Listen, you are being overly harsh on yourself.

You say that your intelligence was “given” to you, like a gift. But then you turn around and say the parts of you that made choices that didn’t result in the life you compare yourself to… those parts you say are 100% your fault. You’re saying your positive qualities are from the outside, but your negative qualities are all you. You’re not being fair to yourself.

We make choices, yes. You can choose to take job A instead of job B. But you can’t choose to be the kind of person who chooses job A instead of job B. Or if you can, you can’t choose to be the kind person who chooses to be the kind of person who chooses job A. At some level, there is something that you don’t choose. It just is. It’s not “choices all the way down”.

This powerful feeling inside you right now is a gift, as awful as it feels. You can, if you want, channel it into the energy you’ll need to confront the things that held you back. Change takes incredible amounts of energy and this feeling combusting inside you might be enough to nudge you in a different direction. Or if you want, you can sublimate that energy and apply it to something like helping bright kids growing up in tough circumstances. You may not be the elite 10x graybeard you imagined, but you probably know better than anyone how to help kids who are growing up like you did. Or you may take that energy and channel it into something totally different.

The way you get past the regret is to use this fire for something. But please, please do not take this fire and turn it on yourself like a blowtorch. Don’t use it to beat yourself and make yourself more timid and more afraid and more hobbled by your past.

You’re going to be ok.

[thomshea]

Beautiful