Words are inadequate

I'm just saying, for my life, it's all butterfly-wing things. My life has been affected a lot more by deciding to wear a particular shirt one day than by any decisions I knew were important at the time. Maybe it's different for other people.

If I were to think about it in terms of "what would I do differently" instead of "what would have happened if", I think things fall into three general periods:

0-18: I don't want to talk or think about it.

18-24: The obvious choice here is to just avoid Mikayla like the plague. If I were replaying the game with my same character, as it were, I'd totally do that. If I were giving myself advice from the future, well, I learned a lot then. I'm not sure I'd be better off having never learned it, even if the process of learning that involved a lot of pain.

24-now: I'd have skipped a couple companies, that's about it. Probably have cut off my parents sooner and started going to therapy earlier.

Weirdly, this kind of thing is the subject of a recurring nightmare I've been having: "Sorry, there was a mistake, you're not actually an adult, you're still a kid. Now go back to school."