It’s a funny thing. Over the last few years, I have met many new friends through various Social Networking sites. Also, I seem to have reconnected with many lost friends on Facebook as well. However, try as I may, I can’t seem to reconnect with the one person I miss the most. The person who made me laugh when I was down. The person who got me through some rough times and cheered me up when I was sad or lonely.

I miss…”Me”.

The person I have become is a far cry from the person I thought I would be at this point in my life. They say almost everyone has regrets in life. I suppose we all make foolish financial decisions or bad romantic choices and sometimes both. I have also made some decisions with which I am happy. Regret is a strange animal (and so is the platypus for that matter, but I digress). I’m sure there are certain things in my life which have brought me happiness that I would have never known had I not made some “bad” decisions.

It’s easy to say what you’d change if you could go back because we all know it’s not possible. Hindsight is, as they say, 20/20 but the past is the past and always will be. There are no time-travelling DeLoreans or blue, police call boxes that can whisk us back to a previous point in history so we can change a decision we made the first time around. We all must live with the choices we make and hope that we’re doing the right thing at the time.

Now, don’t misunderstand me. I don’t lay around my dark bedroom in the fetal position and wallow in self-pity (well, not most of the time, anyway). I try to get up every morning with a relatively positive attitude, ready to make each day as good as I can make it, to varying degrees of success. I’m not miserable. I try to do something positive and constructive during my day. I balance work, family and other personal responsibilities as best I can. I am emotionally and financially in a better place than I was a few years ago, arguably better than I’ve ever been. Sure my waist got thicker and my hair got thinner (and disappeared in some places, showing up in others). All things considered, I think I’ve weathered things fairly well.That being said, I fear I have sold myself short in some way. I’m afraid that I gave up, too soon, the dreams I had. Long gone is the young man who thought he might make his way in the world as an actor or some other sort of entertainer and in his place is a chubby, bald, middle-aged PC repairman who watches too much TV and who’s only acting is done when trying to convince his clients and his boss that he knows what he’s doing.

Maybe I listened to people I shouldn’t have, while not taking good advice from others. Somehow, I may have lost bits of myself along my life’s journey and I’m not sure I’ll ever get them back. I guess I’m going to have to learn how to reconcile that John with the John I’ve become and the John I still have yet to be. I miss the “Me” I once was, but I guess I’ll have to settle for being the best “me” I can be right now…