A friend recently asked me what three things I would tell my younger self. At first, I thought she meant health things. Supplements. Hormones. Sunscreen. All the things I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time thinking and talking about these days. Then I realized my answer was much bigger than that.

I genuinely don’t have regrets. I certainly haven’t made all the right decisions. I mess up ALL the time. I just tend to look at everything I’ve done as an experience, and I think life should be like a tapas dinner. Try a little bit of everything. Jump in. Don’t be afraid. Love people. Go places. Try things. Make mistakes. Change your mind. Experience the hell out of your life.

Maybe that’s why, when I think about my life, I have this visual of standing at the edge of a cliff looking down at this enormous body of water. I can’t see what’s underneath. I don’t know what I’m jumping into. It could be absolutely amazing. It could hurt. It could change my life. It could turn out to be something I never want to experience again. I still want to jump. I want to know what’s down there. I want to experience it for myself.

So if I could stand at that edge with the younger version of me for a few minutes, I think there are three things I would tell her before she jumps.

Marriage

I had absolutely no idea what marriage really meant when I got married. How could I have? I understood love. I understood commitment. I understood wanting to build a life with someone. I understood the word forever. I just hadn’t lived enough of forever yet to understand what it was asking of me.

I started thinking about marriage long before I had one of my own. My parents have been married for more than 60 years, and they are two very different people. I remember being in junior high and actually thinking they should separate. I loved them both. I simply looked at them through my very young eyes and thought maybe my mom would be happier living one kind of life and my dad would be happier living another.

Maybe that’s an odd thing for a kid to think. Maybe it says more about me than it does about them. But even then, I think I was wondering about something I still wonder about now: What makes a marriage worth staying in? What does forever actually mean when two human beings continue changing inside of it?

Now that I’ve been married for 14 years myself, I find myself wanting to talk to people who are older than me about this. My parents. My in-laws. People who have lived 20 or 30 or 40 more years than I have. I want to know what they know now that they couldn’t possibly have known where I am.

What mattered at 40 that didn’t matter anymore at 70? What did you learn to let go? What became more important? How did you change? How did your spouse change? How did you keep finding each other as two different versions of yourselves kept showing up?

There is so much wisdom in people who have lived longer than we have. They have already survived days we haven’t reached yet. They have worried about things that eventually worked themselves out. They’ve made decisions they may understand completely differently decades later. They’ve watched life take turns they never could have predicted. I want to hear about that. I want us to talk about these things. Because marriage is a lot.

I wrote to my friend that marriage is basically life saying, “Here’s your tapas partner. Now you two are eating tapas together forever. And we mean FOREVER.” I still love that.

I would tell younger me to jump all the way in. Love deeply. Commit. Build the life. Experience all of it. Give something enough of yourself that you actually get to know what it is. And I would tell her something else that I didn’t understand when I was younger: You are always allowed to keep choosing. That part matters to me.

You can love something deeply and still ask questions about it. You can honor what you’ve built and still wonder who you are becoming inside of it. You can fully experience a chapter of your life without knowing how many pages it will eventually have.

Sometimes we seem to believe that if something changes or ends, everything that came before it becomes a mistake. I don’t believe that. An experience can be beautiful, important, life-changing and completely real even if it doesn’t last forever.

Maybe I will feel differently about all of this someday. I actually hope I do. I hope 70-year-old me reads this and smiles at how much 50-year-old me still had to learn. That’s part of the experience too.

Aging

The second thing I would tell my younger self is that aging is going to be harder than she thinks, and I mean so much more than looking older.

Your body changes. Your parents get older. People get sick. You lose people you love. You lose animals you love. Your children grow up far faster than seems reasonable. There are things you thought would always be there that suddenly aren’t. And somewhere along the way, time itself starts behaving differently.

When you’re young, a year feels enormous. Later, you start measuring life in graduations and anniversaries and children outgrowing shoes and parents looking different in photographs. You catch yourself saying, “That was ten years ago,” and then realize it was actually 20.

I don’t think younger me could have understood any of this even if someone had explained it perfectly. Some things can’t be handed down as wisdom because you don’t have anywhere to put them yet. You have to live long enough for them to make sense.

Maybe that’s one of the gifts hidden inside aging. You start to understand how temporary so many things are. Something can feel enormous today and barely cross your mind five years from now. Seasons change. Problems pass. Relationships evolve. People surprise you. You surprise yourself.

You begin to realize how much energy you’ve spent worrying about things that eventually found their own ending. And I think that changes how you want to spend whatever time you have left.

I want to sweat less of the small stuff. I want to love people while they’re here. I want to notice my children while they’re still becoming who they’re going to be. I want to sit with my parents and my in-laws and people who are older than me and ask better questions. I want to listen to the answers.

I want to remember that someday I will be the person someone younger looks at and thinks, She has already lived through something I’m afraid of. And I hope I tell them the truth.

Don’t Lose Yourself While You’re Loving Everyone Else

The third thing may be the one I most want my younger self to hear.

There was a time when it was literally just me, Nike and Mable. My time was mine. My life was mine. I could be selfish and self-centered because I had the freedom to be. I didn’t get married until 36 or have kids until 37, and I enjoyed the HELL out of those years. I wouldn’t change them for anything.

And then life filled up. Marriage. Children. Animals. Parents. Family. Friends. A home. Responsibilities. People you love. People who need you. People you would gladly drop everything for. You give and you give and you give.

Years ago, my mom told me something her female family practitioner had said to her. I wish I remembered her exact words because they stayed with me, but the message was something like this: We can spend so many years taking care of everyone else that we slowly give away pieces of ourselves without even realizing we’re doing it.

Then one day, life changes. The children leave home and build lives of their own. People don’t need you in quite the same way anymore. A marriage changes. There may be divorce. There may be death. Parents die. Animals die. Life rearranges itself, because eventually life always does. And you can find yourself standing there trying to put the pieces of yourself back together.

That hits me differently at 50 than it would have at 25. Because I understand the giving now.

I understand how easy it is to love your children so completely that their lives become the rhythm of yours. I understand loving animals, loving your spouse, loving your parents, loving your friends, caring for a home, showing up, remembering what everyone needs, being the person someone calls.

There is so much beauty in giving yourself to people you love. But I don’t want to wake up one day and discover that I gave away so many pieces that I no longer recognize the woman trying to put them back together.

And here’s the part I understand differently now: keeping a piece of yourself doesn’t mean preserving some old version of you. Because she doesn’t exist anymore.

The things I loved at 25 aren’t necessarily the things I love at 50. The woman I was before marriage isn’t exactly the woman I am today. Motherhood changed me. Marriage changed me. Loss changed me. Aging changed me. Love changed me. Every experience has left something behind.

So I don’t think the answer is simply, “Don’t lose yourself.” I think the answer is: Don’t stop getting to know yourself.

Keep checking in. Who am I now? What do I love now? What am I curious about? What lights me up? What have I outgrown? What am I holding onto simply because I’ve held onto it for so long? Who am I becoming?

Maybe keeping a piece of yourself isn’t really about holding onto anything at all. Maybe it’s about staying close enough to yourself that you notice when she changes. Because she will. I hope she does.

Twenty or 30 years from now, I hope I find this and smile. I hope the woman reading it knows things I cannot begin to understand today. I hope she has changed her mind about some of this. I hope she has experienced things 50-year-old me couldn’t see coming. And I hope she is still asking questions.

So maybe I wouldn’t actually tell my younger self to change very much. I’d tell her to keep jumping in.

Love people. Love them hard. Build things. Go places. Stay curious. Make mistakes. Change your mind. Ask the uncomfortable questions. Listen to people who have already traveled roads you haven’t reached. Pay attention as the people you love change, and pay attention as you change too.

Don’t spend so much time trying to make every decision the right one that you forget you’re here to live.

There will be times when you stand at the edge and you won’t know what’s underneath you. That’s life. You won’t know whether this is the experience that changes everything, the one that lasts forever, the one that breaks your heart, the one that becomes your favorite story, or the one you understand completely differently 20 years from now. You won’t know.

So what do I do?

I dive.

Laura Gries is a Transformational Life Coach, yoga teacher and massage therapist at Awakenings Health here in Raleigh. She has been voted the BEST MASSAGE THERAPIST (!!!) in Wake county by Indyweek readers.  She also is the founder of our membership program, Awakenings Online!