Kali Roberge

The Person You Could Have Become

Kali Roberge
The Person You Could Have Become
 

This morning, scrolling through social media feeds when I should have been writing, I came across this post:

Epic quote from [the book] Who Not How [by Dan Sullivan]: “The definition of hell is: Your last day on Earth, the person you became meets the person you could have become.”

I stopped to think about that. The obvious message was that most of us don’t live up to our potential, for one reason or another.

Who hasn’t read the top regrets of the dying and saw their own regrets starting back at them? Who doesn’t live with some unease about not fulfilling their purpose, missing out on important experiences, or failing to understand what matters most until it’s too late?

It does indeed seem hellish to think of meeting some fully actualized You in the future, the You who successfully achieved the biggest clichés humans can come up with — the You who lived life to the fullest, the You who reached maximum potential, the You who regrets nothing and the You who stayed true to self.

Or just the You who made it to some 30 Under 30 or even 40 Under 40 list, instead of the actual you right now who may identify more strongly with tweets like this:

The second I tried to imagine what that would feel like, however, if I ran into The Person I Could Have Been, a very different vision materialized. I didn’t see some idealized version of myself, but the exact opposite.

I saw the me I could have become had an infinite number of little moments throughout my life not turned out in my favor.

I think of myself as an incredibly lucky person. Everyone’s life is a result of some mix of luck and skill and personal choice (with luck usually taking on a stronger role than people like to admit). At critical junctures in my life, luck was on my side. That could have made all the difference.

The person I could have been might have found an early grave, like an aunt of mine who died of a heroin overdose in the 1990s. The person I could have been might been a teen mother, then unmarried with several children with various fathers, like a cousin of mine, just a year older than me. The person I could have been might have lived with undiagnosed bipolar disorder or even schizophrenia, like my mother’s mother, who abused and took advantage of the people around her, irrevocably shattering relationship after relationship until she eventually died alone.

The person I could have been might have never gone to college, struggled with addictions of all kinds, been mentally ill, grown up without love and encouragement, or just made one mistake too many.

None of this is to demonize the people who find themselves in the situations above. Like I said: I am lucky. Profoundly, mind-bogglingly lucky. While I’ve struggled and made mistakes and found myself going down the wrong path, the person I am got the support required to overcome challenges, correct errors, and second chances to choose a better path.

These are scenarios pulled only from my own family. There are an infinite amount of ways life can go wrong. And luckily — miraculously — my life has gone incredibly well.

I think about this often; who would I have been had I not been my father’s daughter, and instead been the child of one of his sisters? Who would I have been had my own mother not found a way to parent me in a way she personally never experienced, and instead continued a cycle of emotional abuse that she herself received?

From the beginning and due to sheer luck I landed with parents who, while not perfect, did manage to get me to an adulthood as an independent, achievement-oriented person with the intrinsic motivation to not screw up too badly and maybe even do pretty well.

Could I do more — accomplish more, earn more, experience more, have more, be more? Sure. Probably.

Like any human being with a brain wired by evolution to not spend unnecessary energy, I pick curling up with a book on the couch more often than I choose to work on a side project or dig into a strategy session for the business. These days I’m happy with “good enough” workouts that keep me fit and healthy, and have officially given up my dream of having six-pack abs. And I still struggle to haul my introverted, slightly-on-the-loner-side self to anything requiring interaction with other people, and I don’t proactively put myself out there as much as I probably should.

But would it be hell to meet, on my last day of life, the person I could have been had I "done more” (whatever that really means)? Happily, I don’t think so. I certainly think I have more to achieve and more to build, and that’s a process that I engage in day by day.

Having more to do, though, doesn’t mean I’ve done nothing so far. Maybe I’m not as close to my ideal, fully actualized, highest-potential-reaching self as I could be… but I also have literally no regrets except that one time I passed Jake DeBrusk outside of the Garden in December 2019, when he and the Bruins were on fire that season, and we made eye contact and I didn’t say something or ask for a selfie or anything.

If that’s my one regret, I think I’m doing alright.

It’s the thought of meeting the person I could have been had I not already been so lucky that stops me from agonizing over everything I haven’t gotten to yet (and might not ever reach). Instead of worrying over something I missed — opportunities, experiences, chances — I feel like falling to my knees in overwhelming grateful for all that I do have, all that’s gone right, all that I’ve managed to do so far.

A “better” me, a version of myself that’s more accomplished or recognized or decorated in some way, could exist in the future if I only pushed harder today. The thing is, you can always push harder. No matter how much you succeed, no matter what heights you reach, something better than what is right now is a moving goalpost.

There’s a fine line between coming up short when you knew you could have done better — and being so focused on better that you never see how good you had it, how good you were, all along.

It’s not hell to think of meeting the “better” version of me on my last day on earth. If anything, when I imagine that meeting, another vision swims readily to mind: I smile at that person and say, “wow, you crushed it! And so did I.”