Brianna Parkins: I’m glad I never got the things my younger self thought I wanted

At the risk of sounding like an inspirational quote your recently divorced auntie posts at 3am on Facebook alongside a stock photo of a rainbow, I am glad I never got what I thought I wanted.

There’s nothing like returning to the place where you spent your formative years to realise your hopes and dreams have been crushed by the passing of time. Thanks be to God. Because you had some truly shite hopes and dreams.

If I had #livedmybestlife as designed by my box-fresh 18-year-old self, I would now be reading the news on telly with two full-sleeve tattoos of clocks, owls, lions and other horrendous 2010, millennial-core cliches with no actual meaning or relevance to my life. I would have some sort of accidental insult to Japanese traditional-style tattoo on my body, even though I have never been to Japan, can’t speak the language and have chicken avocado as my sushi order. Just thinking about it makes me cringe intensely. Taylor Swift might have told us that cringe is an important harbinger of personal growth and “cringe is unavoidable” but culturally appropriating tattoos of dreamcatchers are very avoidable.

When I was last in this town that pretends it’s a city, I didn’t back myself. I didn’t apply to do journalism at uni because it required a writing sample, something I reckoned I was not very good at. If I had got what I wanted at 19, I would be walking about a carpeted office doing something in politics or the public service. I would have to know how to use Excel with proper shortcuts, instead of just lying on my CV that I was “proficient” without being challenged as the good Lord himself intended my path to be.

If I had got what I wanted in my early 20s I would have married a boy who believed I was the reason his professional MMA career hadn’t taken off and definitely not his lack of training or even talent. Strangely, he never made his debut in the octagon even after we broke up. I would have wasted years on men who used women as therapists or rehab centres. I would be making sandwiches on white bread and cutting the crusts off for a man who demanded this well into his 30s.

I would have been negative craic, gone to bed every evening at 7pm and spoken with that special Australian kind of upward inflection that makes every sentence seem like a question?

I’m glad I didn’t end up with any of the nice ones who make perfect life-partners I am sure for others who are not me. I saw on Instagram recently that one ex had congratulated his wife on having a “drug and toxin-free birth” while using the pronoun “we” in front of “went through a tough and long labour at home”. I would have strangled him with the foetal heartbeat monitor. It all worked out rather well in the end that we didn’t have a baby together because I happen to love the scientific advancements of drugs, hospitals and medical intervention.

Another old flame’s recent photo dump made me say a silent prayer we had gone our separate ways. I had gone to the airport lounge and he had gone hiking. The Camino to be exact, up and down hills. With his one-year-old strapped to his back. In the rain. Carrying a tent. That could have been me, I whispered, turning my phone over, giving silent thanks that it was not.

If I had got what I had wanted I would have been a blond-haired, blue-eyed “proper” Aussie who surfed every day and exuded good vibes only. One who didn’t have a big, mad Irish family you could hear from three streets away and whose granny didn’t sing ballads or insist on bringing a teapot to the beach when all the tanned families were eating ice creams. I would have been a minor Home and Away character with none of the depth or plot lines. I would have been negative craic, gone to bed every evening at 7pm and spoken with that special Australian kind of upward inflection that makes every sentence seem like a question? I wouldn’t have an Irish family to shape me and make sure I had a culture that was more than just the thing you drank in kombucha. Most important of all, I wouldn’t have them and their antics to write a newspaper magazine column about.

I have always rejected the fond mammy axiom “What’s for you, won’t pass you” on the grounds that being working class and female means everything I wanted would have traditionally “passed” me by if I had not worked hard and reefed doors open with my bloodied, grasping hands. But now, when I feel grateful for all the things I wanted but did not get, I finally understand.