For a long time, I believed I had wasted most of my life.
The addiction.
The failed relationships.
The bad decisions.
The years spent chasing things that ultimately didn’t matter.
The opportunities I missed.
The people I hurt.
The people who hurt me.
When I looked back, I saw a trail of mistakes.
A trail of detours.
A trail of lessons I seemed determined to learn the hard way.
I think a lot of people feel that way.
At some point you look in the mirror and begin doing the math.
You add up the years.
You add up the failures.
You add up the damage.
And you wonder how different your life might have been if you had figured things out sooner.
I’ve asked myself those questions many times.
What if I had stopped drinking sooner?
What if I had made different decisions?
What if I had recognized certain patterns earlier?
What if I had listened when life was whispering instead of waiting until it started screaming?
Those questions seem reasonable.
The problem is that they assume the person asking them would exist without the journey that created them.
I’m no longer convinced that’s true.
One of the most important realizations of my life came when I stopped looking at my past as a collection of mistakes and started looking at it as a process.
Not a pleasant process.
Not an efficient process.
But a process nonetheless.
Every experience left something behind.
Every failure taught something.
Every collapse removed something that wasn’t real.
Every disappointment forced me to question an assumption I had been carrying.
Even the things I would never choose to repeat became part of the foundation beneath my feet.
The strange thing about life is that understanding rarely arrives before the lesson.
It almost always arrives afterward.
Sometimes years afterward.
Sometimes decades.
The younger version of me believed he was lost.
The older version of me can see that he was learning.
The younger version of me believed he was failing.
The older version of me can see that he was becoming.
That doesn’t mean every decision was good.
It doesn’t mean every action was justified.
It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take responsibility for the damage we cause.
We should.
But responsibility and regret are not the same thing.
Responsibility learns.
Regret stays trapped.
One moves forward.
The other keeps reliving the same story.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become less interested in asking why certain things happened and more interested in asking what they produced.
What did they teach?
What did they reveal?
What did they remove?
What did they make possible?
Because when I look back honestly, I can see that some of the experiences I would have gladly erased were also the experiences that forced the greatest growth.
The collapse forced the awakening.
The loss forced the reflection.
The suffering forced the questions.
The questions forced the search.
And the search eventually led somewhere worth finding.
I don’t believe life happens to us nearly as often as it happens through us.
The events matter.
But what emerges from them matters more.
The person I am today was built from every chapter that came before.
The good ones.
The bad ones.
The triumphant ones.
The humiliating ones.
The chapters I proudly tell people about.
And the chapters I would rather forget.
They all contributed.
They all shaped the outcome.
Nothing was wasted.
Not the pain.
Not the mistakes.
Not the confusion.
Not even the years I thought I had lost.
Because the person writing these words could not exist without the person who lived those years.
The same is true for you.
You may not understand the purpose of every chapter yet.
You may still be living through one of the difficult ones.
But one day you’ll look back and realize that the path wasn’t nearly as random as it appeared while you were walking it.
The lessons were accumulating.
The pieces were assembling.
The person you are becoming was already under construction.
Nothing was wasted.
— Jericho Walls
This reflection is inspired by themes explored in my upcoming memoir, The Jericode: A Memoir of Collapse and Conscious Creation.
The book releases June 21 and is currently available for Kindle preorder:
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