If I Knew Then What I Know Now: The Lie We Tell Ourselves

There’s a phrase we toss around casually, usually with a half-smile and a headshake: If I knew then what I know now. It sounds harmless enough, even wise. But is it?

Because baked into that phrase, I realized, is an impossible assumption … that at some earlier point in our lives, we were capable of holding knowledge that only exists on the other side of experience.

Well, we weren’t. We couldn’t have been. And beating ourselves up for that doesn’t make us wiser. It just makes us smaller.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: you don’t actually know something until you live it. Simply put, you don’t know what you don’t know.

You can hear something. Read it. Be warned about it. Be lovingly coached toward it. But knowing, real knowing, doesn’t live in the brain. Real knowing is quieter than we expect. It’s practical. It shows up as different choices, different boundaries, and a different tolerance for what once felt normal.

Which means most of what we call “mistakes” are actually how we learned in the first place.

We love to believe wisdom is transferable. That if the right person says the right thing at the right time, we’ll instantly integrate it and behave differently. Wouldn’t that be efficient? But, it’s also not how we humans work, as life continues to teach me.

This I know to be true: information is not transformation. Advice is not embodiment. You can intellectually understand something for years before you are emotionally capable of living it.

That doesn’t mean you were stubborn, or you were broken, or ignored the lesson. It simply means you weren’t ready yet. Not because you’re slow or resistant, but because readiness requires a certain internal infrastructure…self-trust, emotional capacity, boundaries, clarity, that only gets built through living.

Most of us walk around carrying a quiet grudge against our former selves. Why did I stay so long? Why didn’t I speak up? Why didn’t I leave sooner? Why didn’t I see it? Because the version of you who could see it didn’t exist yet, that’s why. That version of you had not yet been forged.

Your past self had different tools, different fears, different wiring, and different survival strategies. You made the best choices available with the consciousness you had at the time. Not perfect choices. Human choices. And there’s a big difference.

When we say "If I knew then what I know now," what we’re often really saying is: I wish I hadn’t suffered. I wish I hadn’t struggled. I wish I hadn’t learned the hard way.

Fair point.

But growth is rarely elegant… that’s why we call them growing pains.

Growth is usually awkward, nonlinear, and humbling. It involves choosing things that eventually stop working. It involves outgrowing identities that once felt necessary. It involves staying until staying becomes more painful than leaving.

That’s not weakness. That’s evolution.

Hopefully one day, you’ll look back at this version of yourself with tenderness… not because you had all the answers, but because you kept going anyway.

So maybe it’s time we reframe the notion, If I knew then what I know now, and try this instead: That version of me did exactly what she knew how to do at the time. And this version of me is still learning.

Which when you think about it, isn’t a failure at all.

It’s the whole point.