Here’s how I know I’m still alive (despite a wicked hangover that’s making a bullet to the brain sound real good at the moment): I’m still making mistakes. I pick the wrong guys or the wrong goals or the wrong whatever and pursue them single-mindedly until I get what I want, success is no longer an option, or my goldfish attention span wanders to something else. Then something comes along to slap me back into sense: a cold, sobering morning that reminds me I’m not eighteen anymore and can’t…

By now, you’re probably familiar with my motto: fake it ‘til you make it. But recently I found another motto so devastatingly simply that I couldn’t believe it hadn’t occurred to me before. Ready for it? Here it is: You can’t change what you did, you can only choose what you do. So obvious right? Maybe so, but I still end up repeating it to myself quite often, just as a reminder.

Everyone makes mistakes. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be human, we’d be robots. Or saints.…