One other thing concerning this thread question. Would really like to know approximate ages of respondents.
Got a feeling that with more than a few, it's to early to know yet. Maybe an old heads only thread?
Except for you Lady A, you're an old soul Darlin.
Ore maybe length of using time? Not hatin', just keep in mind lots of dabblers read this shit in hopes of being successful life long Diehards. Rare and we all know it. No sugar coating.
You make a good point indeed. It is rare, and it is possible many youngish "dabblers" are reading this thread thinking, "hah, I knew it, nothing wrong with doing lots of drugs!" (not saying that there is necessarily of course - but again, this statement requires understanding of some, maybe several caveats).
I think it's important however to recognise that all our experiences, good and bad, make us who we are, and wishing things had gone another way if we had only done something differently, made a different choice at a few key moments, is just pining for something that was never real and in all probability
was never going to be real. None of our choices happen in a vacuum - people don't just suddenly "decide" to take a drug and from then on their life is changed, and the same with any other behaviour, with any other choice, whether to study a certain topic or not, whether to take on a certain job or not, whether to move somewhere new, or not...
People don't just randomly
decide shit that alters the course of the rest of their life - even though we often think we do - and also have been sold this fantasy, culturally, in many ways, by the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps mythos", and the well-intentioned but flawed ramblings of many a motivational speaker - "
just DECIDE to make a change!" - or those who have been lucky enough to do very well in life, but not lucky enough to recognise the part that luck played in this -
"one day I just decided, you know, and here I am!"...
Decision making is a process, and whether we recognise it or not, every choice we make is a result of a myriad of influences and other choices made prior to this. This is why in a sense I really dislike questions like this, because they encourage IMO, a warped way of thinking about reality, and about one's life... one rooted in fantasy and with the potential to make one's view of how one's
real life has panned out unfairly negative.
It's a really common flawed way of thinking of course. I hear people say shit like this all the time, "
I wish I had done this, I wish I had behaved differently in some way back then"... maybe this is a communication failure on my part but it seems to be quite hard to get people to understand that well, actually if you had done that, then you would not exist, you would be an entirely different person in many other ways... so unless what you actually mean is "I wish I was someone else!" (and fair enough, some people do mean this, and I feel for them, the struggle to accept reality is real), then probably you don't actually wish that, if you thought about it a little bit more deeply.
Anyway I don't mind clarifying my age. I'm 31, and my first introduction to drug use was around 16 with alcohol. However I think it's unlikely my perspective on the illusory nature of regret will change no matter how old I get... I know, we all change as we age whether we expect to or not, but it's very hard for me to see that this isn't a pretty fundamental truth about being alive, although I know it's something that some people much older than I have never come to understand and maybe never will, so I consider myself very lucky to have come to that realisation at all.
