When Did You Last Play Jenga?
Humans can be weirdly certain about a game that doesn't exist.
Jenga Life.
The rules are simple:
Remove one regrettable block from your past,
Without changing anything you love about your present.
The relationship we stayed in too long.
The financial decision that didn't pan out.
The dream we never chased.
The career we should've left.
The city we should've moved to.
The diagnosis.
The divorce.
The friendship we trusted.
We mentally replay our lives, confidently reaching into the tower.
"I'd pull that one."
"Definitely that one."
"How did I not see that coming?"
With the cocky delusion that the rest of the tower would stay standing exactly as it is.
Except that's not how towers work.
Every block changes the weight carried by the ones above it.
Rearrange the stack, and you don't get a slightly different version of yourself.
You get a different person.
Psychologists call our next move counterfactual thinking.
It's our brain's remarkable ability to imagine alternate versions of the past.
If only...
What if...
I should have...
In small doses, it's incredibly useful.
It helps us learn from mistakes.
Plan better next time.
Avoid repeating painful experiences.
But there's a point where learning quietly becomes self-punishment.
The Woulda Coulda Shoulda Train makes zero stops at Self-Compassion-ville.
Keep your cute caboose from riding that rail.
Our brains are ferociously good at imagining different beginnings.
But ridiculously terrible at imagining different endings.
We don't imagine alternate timelines.
We write fan fiction where every change improves the plot.
Every time we play Jenga Life, we're claiming expertise in an experiment that never occurred.
Confident about a universe that never existed.
About towers we'll never inspect.
About evidence we'll never have.
And there's another wrinkle.
The experiences we wish we'd never had didn't just change our circumstances.
They changed our brains.
Practice a survival strategy long enough and your brain literally gets better at it.
For someone who grew up around unpredictability...
Scanning a room for danger isn't negativity.
It's expertise.
For someone whose safety depended on reading other people's moods...
Hypervigilance isn't a character flaw.
It's a well-practiced neural pathway.
Our nervous systems aren't trying to make us miserable.
They're trying to repeat what once kept us alive.
You're asking your nervous system to retire strategies it once considered fundamental.
I can wish something had never happened without pretending it didn't shape me.
Those aren't opposing ideas.
They're simply both true.
It's also true that I don't have to be grateful for every block.
I can even loathe a couple of 'em.
The ones that were brutal.
The ones that should never have existed.
But I also can't pretend I know which version of me would be standing here if the tower had been built differently.
Maybe she'd be happier.
Maybe she'd be harder.
Maybe she'd still be waiting for the lesson this version of me already learned.
I'll never know.
I only know this tower.
And I really, really, really like this tower.
