What if?

This isn’t going to be a super long one. It might not be the most structured either. Fair warning, I’m not ending this on a happy note, and I’m not going to provide a solution. I want to save it for a later post because I am tired.

I was originally going to write a really long story on how I (fail to) deal with insecurities, but things that recently happened made me realize that insecurities aren’t my biggest fears.

It’s the word “what if.”

These two words start every question I ask myself when I lie awake at night. Like, what if that person never hit that brake when I was crossing the street? What if I had lose control of my balance when walking to school and hit my head? What if I had taken that chance and applied for that internship? What if I had learned German from a younger age? What if I never shut out that friend from my life, would I still have a best friend? What if I was born in a different country? What if I never met my best friends, my boyfriend, or everyone I know?

The list goes on, but these questions have one thing in common — it hurts to say them. It might hurt either to think of better could have, or imagine a worse situation than you’re in. But the word what if implies that everything that has happened is a product of choice, maybe mine, someone else’s, or even destiny’s or God’s. It implies that a simple choice could lead to me living in a whole different world than where I live right now. And sometimes the magnitude of that simple choice hurts.

Sometimes, you don’t know what lies ahead when you choose something. And looking back is when it hits you and you think of what ifs, that’s when you know if you’re making the right choice. Was it A. “what if (something more positive) happened?” or was it B. “what if (something worse) happened?”

If the answer is A, you’ll likely come up with follow up questions like: “was it something I could’ve prevented?” or “would it be different if I had chosen something else?” But perhaps the most hurtful follow up of all is …

“If I wasn’t like this, would (that something positive) happened?”

What would happen if I had been smarter, prettier, skinnier, and if I had my life together?