There's a version of a person that many people carry around for years — sometimes decades — that doesn't actually exist. It's the person they were supposed to become. That person lives in a major city, probably London or New York. That person runs something impressive. People know that person's name for the right reasons. The career trajectory looks good on a timeline, a clean ascent from ambition to arrival.
For one 37-year-old Australian living in Saigon, that person never materialized. What materialized instead was a life running a network of websites with his brothers, married to a Vietnamese woman, spending mornings studying a language he may never fully master and afternoons writing articles that disappear into the algorithmic current of online media. His actual life looks nothing like the story he told himself. And the hardest thing he's ever had to let go of wasn't a person, a grudge, or a failure. It was that story. It's a struggle that turns out to be remarkably universal.
The Gap That Produces the Pain
Psychologist E. Tory Higgins formalized this experience in 1987 with what he called self-discrepancy theory. The framework identifies three domains of self: the actual self (who you currently are), the ideal self (who you aspire to be), and the ought self (who you feel obligated to be based on duties and responsibilities). Higgins found that the gap between the actual self and the ideal self produces a specific kind of emotional distress: dejection-related emotions including sadness, disappointment, and shame. The gap between the actual self and the ought self produces a different cluster: agitation-related emotions including guilt, anxiety, and self-contempt.
What makes the ideal-self gap particularly corrosive is that it's usually about the person someone wanted to become, not just the things they wanted to achieve. It's not "I wish I had a better job." It's "I was supposed to be a different kind of person by now." That distinction matters because you can change a job. Revising an entire self-concept is a different order of difficulty.
Why These Regrets Are the Ones That Stay
Research by Gilovich and Davidai at Cornell, published in the journal Emotion, confirmed something that Higgins' theory predicted. Across six studies, they found that people's most enduring regrets stem more often from discrepancies between their actual and ideal selves than their actual and ought selves. 76% of participants' regrets were about things they could have done but didn't, versus 24% about things they should have done differently. The failure to live up to the ideal self is almost always an inaction: a path not taken, a dream not pursued, a version of yourself you never became.
And these regrets don't fade. The researchers found that people are quicker to take corrective action on ought-related regrets because those regrets involve concrete obligations with clear remedies. You forgot a birthday, you apologize. You neglected a responsibility, you fix it. But ideal-related regrets are abstract and open-ended. "Be the person you were supposed to be" has no specific corrective action. It just lingers.
The Story That Wouldn't Quiet Down
For this particular writer, the story was the belief that life was supposed to be bigger. More visible. More impressive by conventional standards. He spent his twenties feeling behind, comparing himself to people who seemed to be building the kind of lives he had imagined for himself. When he moved to Vietnam, part of him understood that he was building something good. But another part — the part that still carried the old story — kept whispering that this wasn't the plan.
The plan was supposed to involve prestige. Recognition. The kind of career that other people immediately understood and respected. What he got instead was a life that's genuinely good but hard to explain at a dinner party. "Running websites about psychology with my brothers" doesn't land the same way as "partner at..." or "running the Asia division of..." And for years, the gap between the life he had and the life the story said he should have produced exactly what Higgins' theory predicts: a quiet, persistent sense of falling short. It's a pattern that will feel familiar to many readers.
Why the Story Is Harder to Release Than the Person
People talk about letting go of relationships, grudges, past versions of events. And those are hard. But the story of who you were supposed to become is harder because it isn't about someone else. It's about you. It's an identity, and research on self-discrepancy and psychological well-being found that when individuals believe they are too discrepant from their desired self, the resulting emotional distress can contribute to the development or maintenance of depression and anxiety. The actual-ideal discrepancy was associated with lower ability to modulate emotional distress, particularly when people lacked effective cognitive reappraisal strategies.
The story doesn't just produce sadness. It produces a filter through which every good thing in a person's current life is evaluated and found insufficient. Someone can be sitting in a Saigon cafe with a daughter on their lap and a partner across the table and feel, underneath the warmth, the faint signal of the story reminding them that this wasn't the version of success they subscribed to.
What Letting Go Actually Looks Like
Clinical research on self-discrepancy suggests that optimal psychological well-being is achieved not by eliminating the discrepancy entirely but by updating the ideal self to align with authentic personal values rather than external, impossible pressures.
