A short story about a decade/regret

You catch your own reflection in the mirror, and you see a reverse image projected before you. A glance, maybe even a cursory stare, is no bad thing. One, after all, wants to look presentable.

But when that glance becomes an inspection, you begin to notice things you’d never paid the slightest bit of mind to. A spot. A blemish. A hair in the wrong place.

A distorted memory, perhaps.

But it’s hard not to reflect, especially on the precipice of a new decade. Memory lane has a tantalisingly magnetic pull, luring you in to watch replays of the past like a private, personal Netflix. On demand, your best memories are free to watch – but each time, you notice a little detail that wasn’t there before. An interaction, presumably cemented in history, leaps from the undergrowth after taking on a new word and begins to ferment in your mind. Every memory takes on a new ingredient each time, corrupted by the details you’d curiously and conveniently failed to remember before.

Presumably, you’d also forgotten that you’d placed those details there.

And so you pull the thread that nags at your mind, and watch as the memory – and all of those associated with it – unravels before you. You stare avidly at each frame in your personal highlight reel but, rather than sit back and watch, you begin to pick at it. Why did those times end? How did I get here?

Why can’t this happen again?

And on this, the cusp of the ‘20s, I’m picking at every loose thread accumulated over the past ten years. I somehow live in the duality of regretting nothing, yet regretting everything. Honestly, I could never say I’m happy with what I am, where I am and who I am – but I look at myself from the perspective of 16-year-old me, I’m where I wanted to be. And here I am, writing this self-indulgently, wishing I could just focus on the TV and block every senseless point of rumination out.

But the truth is that I’m, strictly speaking, not entirely where I wanted to be circa 2010. I’d followed one path, then followed another – and while I prefer the latter, I partially resent myself for not finishing the former.

Why? Since the turn of the decade, I did everything I could to find my way into an engineering design job. I’d taken all of the right A-Level subjects, fell at every conceivable hurdle, managed to pick my way back up each time and, even when my grades weren’t good enough, I managed to find my way into university.

I was so focused on that path that I dared not take an eye off. I didn’t want to admit to myself that I was probably going to university a year too early, nor have I ever since (until writing this down…). But I didn’t know any better. I didn’t want to admit that I basically wasted my undergraduate years doing the bare minimum. But I didn’t – and still don’t – know how to put myself out there. I didn’t want to admit that my frequent attempts to throw myself into absolutely everything during my masters’ year was a desperate attempt to make up for that lost time.

And I don’t want to admit that I frequently pine for all of those individual periods of time, even those I spent them pining for the better times before that.

And before that.

And before that.

Once again, I’m sat ruminating. What a surprise.

But do I truly resent my ‘failure’? As the unadulterated memory goes, I actively stopped looking for jobs in engineering to play at being a journalist. I threw everything from around 2017 onwards at that seemingly impossible target, and I know that there’s no way I’d ever be in my current position if I hadn’t gone through the unholy ball-ache of the first three-quarters of the decade. Everything paid off – not in the way I’d planned, but in a way that far surpassed my expectations.

But there lies a dull pain – pangs of unfinished business. Unfinished business that I didn’t want or need, but stares at me from the corner incomplete, radiating the clichéd perception that more verdant grass is available on the other side of the river – no matter which side you stand on.

I go into this decade unlike the last, with no real expectations. I don’t have any preconceived notions of what I should achieve – and while it’s partially liberating, it also scares the living shit out of me. I don’t know where I’ll be in five years, let alone ten, and I’m anxious about the opportunities that might cross my directionless path.

And I’m even more anxious about the idea that there won’t be any.

—

Of course, there’s more to my decade than that. Actual, tangible things happened – many I could deal with, many more I couldn’t, and some I’m still learning to live with.

Happiness and heartbreak. Life and death. Love and loathing.

And that was just 2019.

The ’10s form an almost perfect capsule of my growth from teen to uni student to man. Finishing school was a wholly anti-climatic experience; it had just, after years of being unable to be myself or risk some kind of public humiliation, become fun. That said, the transition to sixth form made that experience better, as the majority of people I didn’t enjoy spending time with drifted away from my life, and people who I still love and cherish today entered from stage left.

Two largely-happy years of messing about predictably didn’t exactly mesh with grades. And as I’ve opined, I really struggled to perform in an exam hall. I could do maths, I could do physics, but I couldn’t rush into the world of integrals and differentials with as much enthusiasm as I could for the design coursework. I spent far too much time in the graphic design lab trying new things, because I had the freedom to explore my own mind more than I could elsewhere.

As much as my own mind can be a terrifyingly scary place to be, it sometimes stumbles upon good things. There’s creativity that has to be sated, and a near-constant hankering for the notion of freedom.

Knowing that now, perhaps I’ve done my life up to this point all wrong. Perhaps that’s why I felt so unprepared for university; although I loved to develop new ideas for engineering tasks, I didn’t enjoy having to justify and compromise on those ideas with, you know, actual sound mathematical reasoning.

With glorious hindsight, an engineering course was always too rigid for me.

But it’s taken me to where I am now, which is…writing about it, for the most part. I mean, being able to write about technology stopped me from failing my undergrad studies, and somehow managed to swing me a good mark in the postgrad year. I love what I do, but I can’t help having that nagging feeling again.

You know, the one where I wonder how things would play out if I’d done something completely differently.

What if I’d picked different A-Levels? What if I’d actually kept up with those weird fantasies of being a hotshot lawyer, or a graphic designer, or an architect?

What if I’d not completely fucked up my sixth form studies and gone somewhere else?

Fuck it, what if I was someone else?

I stared in the mirror a while longer, wishing my face was someone else’s and agonising over the details I’ve never had. I’d linger on how I used to look, forgetting that I’ve always hated what I’d seen. You have hindsight when you reflect on the past, just as you have hindsight when you catch your gaze in the rose-tinted mirror.

Gosh, everything would be so much easier if I could learn to like now.