Should I Have Known Better?

For years, I’ve struggled with how to forgive myself for some of the past mistakes I made when I was younger. I did a lot of things I’m not proud of. Some of them were embarrassing, some were reckless, and most of them involved alcohol. It’s honestly a miracle some of those nights didn’t end much worse than they did.

Whenever I thought about that version of myself, I came back to the same conclusion: I should have known better.

As I’ve gotten older, though, I’ve started questioning that statement. Not because I think my decisions were okay, and definitely not because I’m trying to excuse them. I made plenty of mistakes and some of them still make me cringe. If I could go back and handle certain situations differently, I would.

What I’ve been wondering lately is whether I’m judging the person I was with knowledge, maturity, and life experience that I didn’t actually possess yet.

At forty-five, it’s easy to spot the mistakes. I can see where pride got in the way, where alcohol made things worse, and where a different decision would’ve led to a better outcome. I can see those things because I’ve spent the last twenty-something years living with the consequences, learning lessons, becoming a husband, becoming a father, losing people I love, and slowly figuring out parts of life that didn’t make much sense to me back then.

The eighteen-year-old version of me didn’t have any of that. He hadn’t spent decades watching addiction destroy people he cared about. He hadn’t buried his mother. He didn’t have children depending on him. He was just a young guy trying to figure life out, sometimes doing the best he knew how and sometimes making an absolute mess of it.

Why I Started Rethinking My Past Mistakes

A few years ago, I started listening to true crime podcasts during my Tuesday drives to the mountains. There are only so many sports podcasts you can listen to during football’s offseason, and the radio stations disappear once you get far enough into the hills.

One thing I kept hearing over and over was how the frontal lobe doesn’t fully develop until our mid-twenties and sometimes early thirties. The hosts weren’t using it as an excuse for bad behavior. They were usually trying to explain how someone could look like an adult, act like an adult, and still make decisions that seemed impossible to understand years later.

The more I heard it, the more it stuck with me.

Most of the biggest mistakes I’ve spent my life beating myself up over happened before I turned twenty-five. Not every one of them, but enough that I started paying attention when I heard people talk about how long it takes the brain to fully mature.

At first, I found myself wondering if I’d been too hard on myself all these years.

Then the other side of my brain would immediately push back.

After all, I knew drinking and driving was wrong. I knew getting into fights was stupid. I knew I should have finished high school and held a job longer than six months.

Even when I was young, I always thought I was pretty wise for my age. I was the kid making dinner, cleaning the house, and taking care of things while my dad worked late. I wasn’t clueless.

But after years of holding myself to such a high standard, while still making plenty of mistakes along the way, I’ve started looking back at my younger self a little differently.

Maybe I wasn’t some unusually mature kid who should have had all the answers. Maybe I was just another regular kid from Youngstown, Ohio, with a past that was more than sunshine and rainbows, acting out like someone who was still learning how to live within the expectations of society.

Maybe that’s what growing up actually is.

Not having all the answers and learning them anyway.

The Cost of Carrying Guilt and Shame

After years of beating myself up over my past mistakes, I think it took a mental toll on me that I still carry to this day.

I spent most of my adult life trying to make amends for the things I did when I was younger, while at the same time never really believing that anything I did would be enough to make up for them. No matter how hard I worked, how much I matured, or how much better I tried to be, there was always a voice in the back of my head reminding me of who I used to be.

It’s exhausting living your life trying to please everyone around you just so they’ll hopefully accept you despite your checkered past.

A lot of that probably came from caring far more about what people thought of me than I was willing to admit. It’s funny how much energy we spend pretending we don’t care when the truth is often the exact opposite.

Growing up, my family often felt like the black sheep. Whether it was my stepdad’s family parties, my mom’s family parties, or even going over to a friend’s house and knowing their parents thought I was the troublemaker in the group, I always felt like people had already decided who I was.

Maybe some of that was in my head. Maybe some of it wasn’t.

When you’re young and still immature, you almost get to a point where you want to play into how you think everyone feels about you. You get tired of trying to prove people wrong. You get tired of fighting the label.

Eventually, you just pull down the mask and become who you think they already believe you are.

Maybe that’s why some kids stop caring about school. Maybe that’s why some people give up on themselves before they’ve even had a chance to become who they’re capable of being. If everyone already put you in a category, what difference does it make?

At least that’s how I used to think.

The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve realized that even if people were judging me back then, it was still my responsibility to change the script. Nobody was forcing me to keep making bad decisions. Nobody was forcing me to keep proving them right.

I could have woken up any day and started doing better.

That’s the part I had to learn the hard way.

I spent a lot of years feeling sorry for myself when I could have been spending that energy becoming the person I wanted to be. I spent a lot of years focused on the past mistakes I had already made instead of the good I could still do moving forward.

And sometimes I wonder how many people never get past that stage. How many good people spend so much time carrying their past mistakes that they never give themselves a chance to become anything more than them.

When People Can’t Move Beyond Their Past

When I was writing my book, I spent a lot of time reading about addiction and drug use. Even though I’d been around addiction for most of my life, I realized there was still a lot I didn’t understand.

One thing that kept coming up was how many people started using drugs because they were trying to escape something. Sometimes it was trauma. Sometimes it was guilt. Sometimes it was shame. Sometimes it was something they had done years earlier that they couldn’t seem to forgive themselves for.

That part stuck with me.

I know how hard it was for me to look at myself in the mirror at times. I know how much I enjoyed drinking because it quieted my brain and helped me forget some of the things I regretted. Even when I wasn’t thinking about those mistakes every minute of every day, they were always there somewhere in the background.

Now times that feeling by a hundred.

It’s not hard to see how some people end up reaching for stronger and stronger ways to escape.

Even before my brother got into heroin, he liked to dabble in other drugs. Were they gateway drugs? Was he running from something? I honestly don’t know.

What I do know is that when I look at him, I don’t just see addiction.

I see potential.

My brother was smarter than I was growing up. My whole family had high hopes for him. During a few of our many fights over the years, I remember telling him that he was one of the smartest people I knew. I also remember telling him that when he used drugs and acted the way he did, he became one of the dumbest people I knew.

It sounds harsh, but that’s how frustrated I was watching someone with so much potential throw it away.

The older I get, though, the more I find myself wondering what he could have become if he had been able to get away from the addiction and forgive himself for whatever he was carrying around.

And he’s not the only one.

I think there are a lot of people we look at and call a waste of life.

The sad part is that most of them probably weren’t born that way.

They were somebody’s son.

Somebody’s daughter.

Somebody that people once had high hopes for.

Somewhere along the way, many of them became trapped by their past and stopped believing they could become anything more than the person they used to be.

Sometimes I wonder how many great people we never got the chance to see because they couldn’t get past a mistake they made when they were young and dumb.

What I’d Tell My Sons About Past Mistakes

When I think about all the past mistakes I’ve spent years carrying around, I sometimes wonder what I’d say if one of my boys came to me twenty years from now carrying that same weight.

The answer comes surprisingly easy.

I’d tell him to try and let it go.

Not because what he did doesn’t matter. Not because actions don’t have consequences. And definitely not because I’m saying he shouldn’t take responsibility for it.

I’d tell him that he can’t go back and change what’s already been done. All he can do is learn from it, do better moving forward, and make amends if he can.

I’d tell him that carrying all that pain around inside is only going to drag him down.

I’d ask him what happens if he’s meant for something great, but never gets there because he can’t stop punishing himself for something he did when he was eighteen.

What if the mistake isn’t what ruins his future?

What if refusing to move beyond it is?

If he really feels that bad about something, then use it. Let it make you better. Let it make you more compassionate. Let it teach you something worth passing on to somebody else.

One mistake doesn’t make you a bad person.

And no matter what they’ve done, my kids will never have to wonder where I stand.

Whether they’re right or wrong, whether I agree with their decisions or not, they’ll always have me in their corner.

I think that’s one of the greatest gifts a parent can give a child.

The world is confusing when you’re young. You’re still trying to figure out who you are, what matters, and what parts of yourself you want to carry forward. Having even one person who believes in you while you’re figuring all of that out can make all the difference.

Sometimes I wonder how many people never had that.

And I wonder how many lives might have turned out differently if they did.

Maybe That’s the Wrong Question

As I’ve worked through all of this, I’ve realized that I’m probably never going to have a perfect answer to the question that started this article.