Implications

I did the math. Had I withdrawn instead from the classes I quit attending, I would have never been on academic probation. My GPA would never have dropped below a B-plus. This isn't even like a fantasy "if I had been a better student" scenario. If all else was the same, same dropping the ball, letting things slide, failing to learn and then learning from the failure, not learning to work harder earlier...I would have still had a B-plus. I just didn't know. The possibility of success was very real, and I just didn't know. I am so sad for my past self. 

I am also concerned looking at the implications of several events around my relationship with Kevin. So many of the poor choices I made, done differently, could have led to me not marrying Kevin. I still may have, and they way I imagined it in my insomnia-induced day dream, I did. I was just more confident, more accomplished, and more independent. It may have happened differently, though. It's possible, even probable, that Kevin would have made no advances of his own. Daydreams aside, I have never been the type to get attention, to be wooed and pursued. Maybe things would have ended differently than they played out in my head. Maybe I would have ended up with Jared, or even Jon, or someone else entirely.

I also found it upsetting how much joy it gave me to imagine these scenarios. Happy, confident, and thriving in my youth. That joy, and the mourning when it ended, fed fuel to my current crisis, which I swear to explain at some point. First, the preliminaries. The causes, before the effect. This rewriting of history is one of the causes.