Sometimes being on the wrong path can lead you to the right path down the road.
Sometimes we do not realize that we are on the wrong path in life until we are too far in to turn around. Everyone has had an experience like this at least once in their life.
For years, we have all engaged in unhealthy activities, and then we wake up one day and wonder what we have been doing to ourselves. Because we have dug ourselves so deep into a hole, we end up suffering the consequences later on in life. We have all had that one relationship that we invested so much time in a relationship that would eventually have an expiration date, and we were eventually sidelined to discover that we had invested so much time in something that was temporary.
Once you have had an experience like this, it is very easy to fear that this will happen again later on in your life. There is this fear that you might wake up one day that one mistake after the next, after the next will lead you to a place that you didn’t want to be.
Eventually, you become very hyper vigilant- that is, you will constantly second- guess yourself and constantly think things through in order to avoid another heartbreak.
But you won’t.
When you are on the absolute wrong path in life, you are actually aware the entire time–when you finally have no choice but to come to terms with it, you get your epiphany.
The point blank of it all is that you know that you are on the wrong path in life the whole time.
You knew what you were doing when you had engaged in such self-destructive behavior. There was never a point in time where you said that what you were doing was healthy and would lead to your eventual happiness.
You knew what you were doing when you got yourself into debt. You knew what you were doing when you starved yourself, or binged on food all night. You knew what you were doing when you started drinking, going out and partying and rebounding with other guys. You knew what you were doing, but still had enough mental ammunition to keep justifying to yourself that what you were doing was the right thing to do.
The point is that you don’t take your moral compass away, but you will talk yourself out of it at times in order to serve yourself best. Your innate understanding of right and wrong will never go away, but it will get clouded by fear, by attachment, by the idea that what’s in front of you is the best you may ever have.
This goes to say that your acknowledgement for self-destructive behaviors as being bad for you is clouded because it gives you some form of comfort, which means that you have convinced yourself that it is somehow justified.
If you want to spend your life worrying that you are making mistakes, don’t bother.
Deep down, you already know.
You know that this job isn’t the one for you.
You already know that you need to get yourself cleaned up and get your act together.
You already know the issues that are in your current relationship, and you already know whether or not you are willing to work through them.
You already know what you need to do, and what you don’t.
You know what you are doing even if you pretend that you don’t. But the longer that you put off acknowledging the issues, the more lost that you are going to be.
Your “big mistakes” in life never occurred because of the consequences they carried, but it is because your vision has been clouded into thinking that it is the right thing when in reality it was not.
Getting honest with yourself is the best self-protection there is.
Give that to yourself at least. Go forward with some faith that you can trust yourself and that you are no longer going to lie to yourself–even if the truth is not what you wanted it to turn out to be.