For the longest time, I kept a secret from everyone, including myself. I always wanted to be a writer but felt that sweeping it under a rug would allow me to be happy. I was so wrong.  Don’t you sometimes wish there was a chance to go back and rewrite history? Granted, if that were possible, one would want to give Hitler a wedgie or prevent colonization. But if there really is such a thing as the ‘butterfly effect’, I’d rather start small and just change my own past. Or, at the very least, one teeny tiny decision. 

Out of Sight isn’t Out of Mind

Our brain is a funny animal. It plays tricks on us all the time. And the way it does that is trough messing with our memory. Experiences, skills, and even emotions you don’t remember appear one day when you least expect them, putting everything you’ve learned about yourself into question.

Sadly, we humans don’t come with a button that restores us back to our factory settings. As the years go by, one starts looking backward more than forward, like a passenger on a train closer to its destination than its point of departure. We start hoping for some way to rewind the clock. Once you hit your mid-thirties, Nostalgia, dressed as a ticket collector with his trusty partner Hindsight, starts visiting the various booths of your memory. They make a formidable pair. Nostalgia has the ‘good cop’ part down pat. It will show clearly how there had always been two passengers on the train: the part of you that you were always meant to me and the one you decided to be. There’s no malice or hatred in Nostalgia’s mannerism when it lays it out in the open. How you trapped the real you in the basement, sneaked food down to him, kept him alive, but never let him out into the light.

Hindsight comes with the fangs and proceeds to sink them into the flesh of your memory to lay bare the wound you had caused the first time you decided to suppress your true self. If it senses even the tiniest hint of regret, Hindsight will not let you rest until you have resolved the issue or gone mad, tearing your hair out. It knows where you live, regularly dropping in unannounced and demanding answers. Pray that when it knocks on your door, you have an air-tight case. I know because I didn’t have the answers when I faced up to my sense of disappointment. It all began with a cake and some candles.

Also Read: How to Avoid Procrastination and Write Effectively

We See What We Know

On my fourth birthday, my grandfather predicted that I would become a government officer. Given the nature of the occasion and the age/ mental state of the person he was making it about, it was an off-the-cuff observation. But my grandfather stuck to his guns; he had seen enough to reach that decision, and he was not going to budge. Apparently, within the first four years of my existence, I had proven to him that bureaucracy would be my true calling.

I wasn’t very talkative and smiled even less, and yet, he said, my eyes seemed to miss nothing. This was too much information for a four-year-old to handle, let alone understand. So, I filed the incident away, tagging it with all other meaningless experiences I must have encountered in the fourth year of my existence on Earth. All I kept with me were the words government officer and the sense that this entity had some sort of superpowers.

Sometimes, we base our opinion on the absence of something as proof of something completely unrelated. Because predictions are bound by the limits of one’s imagination. While my grandfather was right about my observant nature, he made the wrong correlation. 

Trust Your Inner Voice, It Won’t Let You Down

It’s true that growing up, I wasn’t the kid who told the best stories, but I certainly wrote the most imaginative ones. Writing came naturally to me. As if to compensate for my lazy tongue, God had given me an overly imaginative nerve and a prolific writing hand. To feed my starving mind, I developed over time a sharp eye for details and a keen nose for plot and narrative. For me, it wasn’t enough that my milk was cold that day. There had to be a backstory to it. Maybe the cow ate a lot of ice cream that morning or went outside without wearing a hoodie. Okay, fine. Maybe the bottle had been in the fridge for too long.

The point is, in my mind, everything had a story. I just didn’t know what to do with it at that point. I don’t know if my grandfather’s remark turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy or whether he just saw something that was always in me before anyone else, but as I grew up, I found myself being pulled towards a career in the public sector.  If I’m being really honest, it was more push than pull, but I placed too much value on what others thought of me and not enough on what I felt. 

If You Live to Please Others, You Will End Up Sad

I remember the day my dad took me out for lunch when I came to the city for my O-level exams. By then, I had been in a boarding school for three years and considered myself a ‘world wise man’. But as far as speaking man-to-man was concerned, this was the first time I had been on a one-on-one grown-up’ business lunch’ with my father. Every son worth his salt looks up to his dad and strives to live up to their expectations. I was no different. I had some cache with my father, having been admitted three years ago to his alma mater, a prestigious military boarding school. If I were in the Mafia, I’d be a ‘made’ man; untouchable; able to ask for whatever I wanted. 

Then, ‘disaster’ stuck in the form of a younger brother, forever shattering my ‘only son’ hegemony. Years later, I would realize that although I loved my brother, his arrival had activated a medieval button in my mind, which in turn triggered an eternal quest to gallop off one quest after another. I was always looking to vanquish some foe and redeem myself in the eyes of my father as his true and worthy successor.

In my case, the damsel in distress I was constantly rescuing was father’s approval. I just had to have it. Time after time, I had to slay the same darn dragon every time my brother did something new, like taking his first step or achieving a breakthrough like uttering ‘Googoo gaga.’

I want to say that it was juvenile, and I grew out of it. But that wouldn’t be the truth. It happens in every family, and looking back, I’m actually grateful to my brother (although I’ll deny it to his face if any of you ever bring it up), for it gave me the tailwind I needed to pursue whatever goal I had at that time. The same theme has been playing on and on in an infinite loop, albeit with slight plot changes. 

And so, back to my lunch with my dad.

As I munched my chicken cheeseburger with fries, my father asked me about my future career aspirations. Now, any fifteen-year-old will tell you what the standard response to such a query when it comes from a grown-up is: go for the vetted (read: socially acceptable) answer. In my case, the answer should have been the Army (my father was a proud soldier) or the Civil Services (fulfilling my grandfather’s prediction).

Having already proved my worth three years ago, I felt I had enough cache to let my father know I did not see myself in military fatigues. And he, with a father’s intuition (it is a thing), knew not to push. He said numerous times that his father wanted him to go into the Civil Services, too, but the entrance exam was just too tough. In a weird generational pass-the-wish, my father felt that if I cleared the exam and joined the Civil Services, he would, in a way, be living up to his father’s and my grandfather’s expectations.

Birds: 2

Stone:1

Me: stone

Little did I know then what I was putting myself in for. But then that’s the thing; we only see the consequence of our words much later. At that time, I was much more preoccupied with my chicken cheeseburger and proving myself to my father. Both are equally important and commendable. So, long story short, I knew my answer: the Army (just to see Dad light up) or the Civil Services (to see him shoot through the roof with joy).

I said neither and went for the third option.

The truth.

I don’t know if it was the extra mayonnaise or my new-found ‘adult’ status, but the operator inside my head, whose duty it was to prevent me from blurting stuff out in front of grown-ups, slipped up. I said that I wanted to be either a writer or a professional tennis player. As I was washing down the last of the burger with my Coke, I saw him give me an exasperated look, and with that, our first man-to-man ended on a low. Feeling utterly embarrassed at having disappointed my father, I agreed to join the Civil Services.

And so it was that time and time again when I had thought that I had learned to play the part of the government officer; I would look down at my official notepad and see the prologue to a story. Sometimes, it would be a dialogue between a sheriff and an outlaw, sometimes a tale about three brothers born in three different decades, while my boss would be dictating a letter to be written to the Agriculture department for the latest import procedures for cotton. As much as I tried or ignored it, I could not shut off the valve. Over the years, the real me, the one I had locked inside the basement the day I decided to join the Civil Services to please me father, kept planning his escape. Like Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption, the writer in me refused to give up on the dream of writing. He kept crawling through rivers of shit just to be finally able to walk out clean. 

The Truth Shall Set You Free

It wasn’t an epiphany, more like an awakening. I used to see all these famous people in the news and on the screen and the one thing they all had in common was this happy glow on their faces. Some of them were living in really tough conditions that made you question their sanity. But you couldn’t doubt the pride and contentment that literally oozed out of them. I was reading a lot of Mark Manson who has explained it much more eloquently here, but the point was, success and its trappings were a byproduct and not the goal. After more than a decade of living someone else’s dream, I realized that I wasn’t happy. I needed to release the stowaway I had been carrying with me all these years. He had been a good companion. Through him, I had made sense of the world—of love, life, and everything else in between. 

It’s Never to Late to Change the Future

Every action of ours has a timeline, and if you go back far enough, you come to the point where you could have switched the tracks of the train and ended up at a different destination. We are told that once the train leaves the station, whatever and whoever you decide to become is what you will be. There are no refunds or changes to the destination. But that’s not true.

You might not be able to change the past, but you can always make the right decision in the present and change your future. It’s never too late to start again. Life isn’t a race; it’s a marathon, and as all runners will attest, you get to the end only if you’re at peace with yourself and the world. Nobody can see the future, let alone predict it for you. Advice, while mostly well-intentioned, is nothing more than a form of nostalgia. It might come from the right place, but it can’t predict where you’re going. Only you decide where your destination lies. You have the power to make your own path. So, make it a good one.