“Every time I’ve gone back to Waco since graduation, a little bit more of me has died.”

I was alarmed by the language and tone of my friend’s text message.

My group of friends were merely discussing hypothetical places where we would want to meet for a group reunion. Most of us live in either Dallas or Houston, but one friend suggested we return to Waco — “back to where it all started.”

We’re a diverse bunch — many of us children of African immigrants, with a couple Black Americans and a couple white people. We all went to university together, most of us graduated the same year, and all of us formed strong bonds during the study sessions in the school library that characterized many of our late nights.

My Eritrean friend continued. “Every damn time, I ask myself what the fuck am I doing here.”

“Why do you even go back anyway?” I asked. Given that I, having lived in Waco for most of my life, have little desire to ever return other than to see family, I was confused as to why my friend went back so often — especially considering how those pilgrimages made him feel.

Apparently he had gone back to watch our school’s basketball team and hang out with some friends.

“Some friends and I went to a coffee shop and were talking about things we would have done differently in college. It was all just sad. The friends you make are really the only good part of it all.”

I felt where he was coming from, and I didn’t necessarily disagree. College, for me, was about as valuable and fruitful as it was discouraging and damaging. I spent those 4 years fighting just to maintain a presentable GPA, guzzling Red Bull and Mountain Dew (aka poisons) to stay awake during the all-nighters I pulled before test days, reevaluating my career options every few months because I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, suffering periods of depression caused by all of these things, and consoling my friends during their own mental breakdowns. But I also matured in various aspects of my life, improved my self-esteem and shrugged off the internalized anti-Blackness of my high school days, and met the realest, truest friends of my entire life — the people who inspired me and kept me going when I was on the verge of mental defeat.

My friend was probably alluding to decisions he wished he made, grades he wished he had gotten in certain classes, scores on placement tests that he wished he’d achieved. My immediately thought was: that’s a dangerous rabbit hole to go down.

“I don’t think too much about what I would have done different,” I said. “That’s a recipe for sadness.”

The conversation got me reflecting on my college years, and just generally about life. There are decisions I made in college that I regretted. There are classes I wished I had taken, and some that I wished I had taken more seriously. There are people that I regretted becoming involved with, and organizations I wished I had joined. There were hours that I spent goofing off that I wished I’d spent studying; there were hours spent studying that I wished I’d spent getting adequate rest. There were times when I kept silent and I wished I had spoken up, and times when I spoke when I wished I had shut up.

There’s a whole trail of decisions I made, which informed other decisions that have eventually led me to where I am right now. But I find it a fruitless exercise to reminisce on all the decisions I regret — a futile, depression-inducing exercise. After all, my youth, naïveté, rebelliousness, and limited worldview didn’t put me in the best decision to be making these career-implicating decisions. So why beat myself up about it?

I had to learn to stop looking in the rearview and keep my eyes on the road. I had to stop worrying about changing the past and start learning from it. I had to remember that hindsight is 20/20, but foresight is blurry, and that it’s okay if we can’t see our futures crisply — it’s okay if all we can manage are small, incremental steps within our periphery.