It's one of those things writers always write about, because we all go through it. If we're lucky.

I grew up eating my steaks done to medium.  I remember going to a certain steakhouse with my family fairly often, maybe as often as twice a month, because my father loved steak and he knew either the manager or the owner.  Honestly, I was so young and I cannot remember which.  But I have a very clear memory of the steaks coming out of the kitchen with these little plastic tabs that stated how cooked each steak was.  Medium was always a dark blue tab, and that’s what dad always got.  By default, so did I.

Steak was my favorite food for a very long time.  Every year we would each get to ask my mother to make whatever we wanted for dinner on our birthday.  My sister would inevitably ask for something new and interesting (and I can’t remember a single meal she requested).  My father often asked for things that were off the wall (green eggs and ham, I kid you not – my mother managed it).  I always asked for steak, mashed potatoes and corn on the cob.  In winter.  My mother might be a saint (or the long suffering abbess, from so many movies).  And, as always, the steaks were cooked between medium and well done.

Well, eventually we all grow up, and our tastes change, as my mother always says.  However, I find it interesting when we can pinpoint those exact moments when our tastes change.  For me and steak, it came in the form of a boyfriend.

T was a mistake, pure and simple.  Looking back, I’m shocked at the sheer idiocy of dating this man.  He wasn’t a pleasant person, he had significant self-esteem problems which he then took out on my own self-esteem problems, and I suspect he had significant mental health problems to boot.  His outward demeanor was that of a strong-willed, stoic man who knew a lot about his chosen interests.  In truth, he was a complete popinjay with his opinions and need to keep up certain appearances.  A terrifying parody of the man he wanted to be and the apogee of my poor high school choices.

All of that said, I can’t deny I learned a lot from that relationship, and one of the more mundane things I learned was that beef is better rare.  I remember going out to a steakhouse with him and a few other people once and him saying, in his “tough guy” voice, “Fire, meet meat.  Meat, meet fire.  This meeting is now over.”  This was how he described to his friends why he’d ordered his filet “as rare as possible”.  In truth, he was right.  I had some of his dinner that night, having ordered my own medium filet (a thin line of pink in the middle), and probably would have devoured it all given half a chance.  Between this, and his introducing me to sushi (and that meeting lasted quite a long and luscious time), I can’t help but look back and be thankful for having dated him.  Sometimes that teenage girl bone-headed need to please her boyfriend leads to something good.  On occasion.  I don’t think I’d have tried “raw fish” for anyone else.  Knowing his obsession with Japanese culture and wanting to keep him happy lead to another wonderful food experience.

I used to look back at that relationship (and others, of course) and think about how much better my life would have been if I’d never dated him. We all have these moments in life, where we wish we’d done something different, but I think we almost all eventually come back to owning those choices and saying, “Forget that.  It may have been a stupid choice, but it was MY choice, and it helped forge me into who I am today.”  Perhaps, though, that is dependent on our liking ourselves.

This is also an attitude I tried to convey to my friend J awhile back, when we were discussing her grandfather’s death, and how he’d told her he had a life of no regrets, and she wished she could say the same.  I love J dearly, and I wish she could look at her “regrets” and see that they helped her be the woman all her friends find so wonderful.  Or at least understand that perhaps all her grandfather was saying was that, looking back on the entirety of his life, if he’d made other, “smarter” choices, he would quite possibly not be viewing the picture he had made by the end – and that he loved this picture and wouldn’t have it any other way.  I not only failed to convey this to J, but had my friend A trying to tell me the same thing I was trying to tell J when I shared this conversation with her.  Clearly, my communication skills need some work.

This doesn’t mean I believe “everything happens for a reason”, because that’s not the case.  I don’t find it credible that I was guided into dating a psycho SOB just to learn to like sushi and rare steak.  If there is a guiding force in this universe, I’d think it would find a better way to teach such mundane lessons.  I just think perhaps that when I look at the knots in the rope I’ve climbed to become this person I am – this person that I rather like – they’re more like a curlicue design and there is something to learn in both the hardship and the good.

And there was plenty of good that could become hardship, or things that seemed to be hardship that ended up being exactly as I wanted them to be later.  I certainly can’t help but wonder what might have been when I look back at certain parts of my life.  If that’s not basic human nature, I don’t know what is.  And I am not so free of desire that I don’t wonder.  But I no longer listen to Calliope’s siren song of what might have been, and write whole new lives based on her ethereal words.

Or, at least I don’t listen to her when she speaks to me of what might have been.  She’s still got my attention when she talks to me of what could be.  I just suspect that what lies ahead never seems so epic compared with what lies behind, so she has less to say.  Let’s face it, my life could be changed if I wear that risqué shirt or manage to otherwise change my apparel in an aesthetically pleasing way, but mostly what will change will be that I’m feeling better about my clothing choices.  The Odyssey, this is not.

I guess the journey I did have came in the form figuring out how to accept what happened without overly dwelling on those things I sometimes wish I could change.  Because when I think about what I could change, it’s so easy to think about it all coming together the way I want it to.  When I take the time to look back and see how I could change it and how the change would realistically change my life, it’s almost never a more appealing life than the one I have now.  The things that would make my life more appealing are often not within my control.  Woe is me.

Oh, and for the record, my mother probably wishes I’d never dated T.  Not only did she see what a loon he was from the beginning, but she is disgusted when I get my steaks rare.  But she likes the person I am too, so she accepts me – rare steaks, psycho exes and all.

My mother really is a saint.