So, my career path has been what some people might call “unconventional.” While I can see the thread connecting most of my choices, I will admit the path has definitely been long and winding. Which has led people to (pretty consistently) ask things like, “What are you doing now, Annmarie?” or “Have you ever thought about doing X instead?”
A lot of times those questions are pure curiosity and I love engaging those. But sometimes they’re driven by plain old fear. My choices can be a little triggering for people who highly value stability.
Which is probably why this line from Ashley Poston’s book, Sounds Like Love stopped me:
“How do I forgive my past self for all the futures I didn’t become?”
You know the futures she’s talking about. The lives we once stood on the edge of. The move across the country you never made. The degree you didn’t finish. The job offer you didn’t accept. The business you never started—or eventually shuttered.
I think about those choices all the time. Probably too often. I’m an overthinker. What can I say? It’s baked into my DNA.
But here’s what really made me sit with that quote:
It assumes there’s something we need to forgive ourselves for. And I’m not sure there is.
Most of the time, our past selves weren’t sabotaging us. We were standing exactly where we were standing, with what we knew, what we were afraid of, and what we could carry at the time. We weren’t necessarily choosing against one future. We were choosing for something else—safety, love, survival, curiosity, or simply the next right thing in front of us.
And lately, I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the context of my own long and winding path. Because somewhere along the way, other people’s questions became the voices in my head.
Why can’t you stick with one thing?
Why are you so flighty?
Why do you keep changing what you do?
And those questions only serve to make me feel bad.
So what if reframed those questions and instead thought: I’m not flighty, I’m the person brave enough to follow my passions. Or someone willing to create from the core of who I am. Or someone willing to risk changing course when the road I’m on no longer feels like mine.
I gotta say it, while some days those things are hard to believe, every day they make me feel a lot better than those nasty, nagging questions.
And here’s some additional truths I need to admit to myself: Yes, I have a safety net that has allowed me to take some of those risks. And for a long time, I told myself it was the safety net that allowed me to make the choices I’ve made.
But I don’t think that’s true anymore.
Maybe without that safety net, my risks would have been subtler. Maybe they would have been side projects or side hustles. But I would still been the person who needs change, creativity, and yes, a little risk. Because I’ve realized that’s baked into my DNA too.
So maybe, all those futures we didn’t become aren’t evidence we chose wrong, but rather they’re breadcrumbs. Little bits that tell us things about what we want, what matters to us, what we were reaching for—and what we might still be reaching for.
It seems to me that the real trap is that we’ve been taught to audit our lives like a ledger. Paths taken versus paths squandered. Good decisions versus bad ones. Life as a problem to be solved, a mistake to be corrected, a version of ourselves we should have somehow optimized into existence.
But what if, instead of peering through the door of every future we didn’t walk through, we turned around and looked at the person who’s actually here?
Not as a consolation prize. Not as, “Well, I guess this is what I ended up with.”
But as the real, textured, still-becoming person standing in the kitchen right now, making coffee and reading this. She’s neither a leftover, nor a compromise.
Let’s stop thinking about forgiveness and start thinking about acceptance. And curiosity. (I’ll do it, if you do it!)
And we can start with this journal question:
If you stopped auditing your life for the paths you didn’t take—or stopped letting other people define what your path should look like—and started noticing the breadcrumbs along the one you did take, what would you see?
