were there clues i didn't see?

We often find ourselves preaching to the choir. Every time someone has asked me what advice I should give say entering college students or graduating college students wondering what their next steps should be, I always say you'll regret the things you didn't do more than the things you did do and that didn't work out.

And yet, I have been haunted by the biggest "didn't do" regret of my life for the last four years. Let me make something clear, I have wanted to be a published author since I was 8. That is and always will be my number one dream. To buy a house on a cliffside town, tuck away to my personal library, sit at a big oak desk, and write from sun up to sun down.

But I also know that life is years and years away from me. I need to have lived a life, a career first in this unfortunately capitalistic society.

So I find something that I want to do until that cliffside day. Only I did. And then I ran from it.

In the Spring of 2018, I was doing what a lot of graduating college seniors do: preparing to start a masters degree in the fall. Some kind of continuing education was basically required of me because what was I going to do with “just an English degree”? Over the course of that summer, my mental health fails. Absolutely fails. I am under crippling pressure, most of which I put on myself. I finally broke. I withdrew from the program weeks before I was set to start. I was going to go to school for Historic Preservation.

I excelled in my related undergrad courses and was heading straight into a masters at the same university. And then I wasn’t.

I think about the scene in Loki where you see the timeline on that retro TV grow a branch. I feel like that’s been the last four years of my life. Someone else’s life. And I have been clawing and scraping to erase that branch off the screen. I didn’t want to be one of the people I talk to when I tell them I’m going back that says “I thought about going back but didn’t.” I *will* be one of those people that goes back because not continuing on four years ago has been by far my biggest regret in life. Maybe it was for the best but I’m not letting the drive to do this die off this time.