It’s not uncommon for people coming out later in life, whether at 25 or 55, to have regrets about the road not taken. Many of my clients are coping with regret about not coming out sooner. But regret usually operates on two major errors: it forgets that we didn’t have all the information and power we have now, and it assumes that the alternate timeline would have worked out perfectly.
“I should have come out sooner”
You’re probably familiar with the saying, “Hindsight is 20/20.” It’s easy to look back, see how things played out, and fantasize about how different things might have been if you made a different choice. But criticizing your past self is usually unfair. We are putting the responsibility on our past self to make choices based on knowledge, skills, or experience that person didn’t have at the time.
Sometimes my clients come to me with a belief that they “should have” come out sooner. They feel guilty about spending time in cishet relationships. They mourn the body they might have had if they claimed their gender before puberty took hold. They wish they would have deconstructed their religious beliefs sooner. fThey grieve the lost opportunity to be young and queer in the dating scene. They think they should have been stronger, braver, or, somehow, indifferent to what their families and friends would have thought about them.
This is all terribly unfair to the younger self.
When that inner critic is giving you a hard time about the past, ask yourself, with nonjudgmental curiosity, why did I make that decision at the time? What, at that moment, did I think was best? What skills or options did I not have at the time? We often unfairly expect our past selves to have all of the knowledge, growth, skill, maturity, and insight we have in the present.
You made the best choices you could at the time. You did not have all the information you have now. It was probably not realistic or safe to come out in your religious environment, your family, or your community, or you would have done so.
“If only I had come out while I was a teenager…”
The unfairness of self-judgment is especially relevant when looking back at what you did or didn’t do as a child or teen. If you’re like many of my clients, you’ll look at your childhood choices through the lens of your adult mind. You remember events as if it’s the present-day you that was there. But it was a different you.
Whenever someone tries to tell me that they should have known better as a kid, I understand why it feels that way, but I’ll ask, have they talked to any kids of that age lately? When I remember being 15, it feels like the same me that is writing this post, decades later. But when my daughter was 15, being around her and her friends showed me that it would be wildly unfair to expect my past 15-year-old-self to have made better choices. They were all good and smart kids, but they were children. They knew and understood so little. I was no different. At 15, I wasn’t any less of a kid than my daughter and her friends were a few years ago.
Children are also dependent on the adults who care for them, and this means the adults have more power. When you rely on your family for shelter, food, clothing, safety, and so on, you do not get to call the shots. Again, using your adult mind it’s easy to think, I just should have stood up for myself! But when you are 8, or 12, or even 16 years old, you simply do not have full control or power over your own existence. Compliance was required for survival.
“If I had just ___, things would be much better for me now”
Regret sells us a lie that there is an alternate timeline, in which we did everything “right,” which would have led to the present working out perfectly. When we fantasize about what we shoulda-woulda-coulda done, we imagine a sanitized, happy version.
But we can’t know what would have happened if we had made different choices. Any life path comes with hardships and challenges. Maybe coming out earlier would have resulted in difficulties you can’t see now. Maybe your relationships would have suffered, or you would have picked up an addiction, or you would have had financial struggles, or… who knows!?
In the 90s movie Sliding Doors, the main character’s life takes on two very different trajectories based simply on whether she catches or misses her commuter train one day after work. In each of the two versions of her life, the protagonist knows nothing about the other timeline. We make the choices we make, and we only get to see how that version plays out. The idea that “better” choices in the past would have “fixed” our lives is a lie.
Case Example (not a real person, a composite)
Bree came out as bisexual around age 35. She had already been married to her husband for 10 years, and didn’t have any intention of leaving her marriage. But, once she understood her own sexual orientation, she felt sad about the experiences she never had. She found herself wishing she could go back to her single days, so she could date people of all genders and explore her own sexuality more fully. She was mentally kicking herself for settling down so quickly and for buying into the narrow expectations of her religion at the time.
However, over time she was able to work with a therapist to show her past self some compassion, and to mourn the life she did not live. She recognized that she had made the best decisions she could with the information and insight that she had at the time. She knew that 25-year-old-Bree was not prepared to claim her full sexuality or to go against her family. She allowed herself to feel sad about not dating women when she was young and single, and acknowledged that loss. She also saw that her life had worked out well in many ways, and that if she hadn’t married her husband she wouldn’t have her two children, whom she loved more than anything. She recognized that changing her past would mean missing out on the good things she has in her life now. She also recognized that she may have had unforeseen difficulties if she had made different decisions.