On seeing happy young people in the past and present

When young myself I often kept surreptiously looking at happy young people being myself desperately unhappy and unable to connect. I could not reach at the world, at my own experience, and, most importantly, at other people. A horrible failure and impotence of courage and character. So, I kept seeing happy young people and idealizing and misjudging them to a degree, not understanding their own incomplete happiness often interrupted by their own mistakes, weaknesses and occasions of bad luck.

Then it happened that finally I too became rather happy while being still youngish and I understood better lifes, and their imperfections including my own, and did connect with the world, experience, with amazing people justly loved by me. The issue seemed quite resolved then and I did not have time or inclination to rehearse the old regrets. Strangely enough though this fall I have restarted seeing happy young people and have felt that decades old pain again for no visible reason but, one supposes, due to certain unhappinesses of the present that manifest through these old traumas. Flashbacks in other words. I wonder even if therapy would be needed but it would seem rather pointless to analyze and grieve for the life my early 20's self so unhappily missed and wasted. Life is indeed a strange and slippery thing.

And if I should not have lost my way?

As I wrote earlier life regrets come in slow long intervals, reflecting undoubtedly the low tides of current life and raising to the surface old hurts, old failures. My youth was dominated by emotional trauma and lack of social courage and understanding. I fled to books and thinking, and there are worse hiding places, and partially through reading and thinking I did achieve a healing and I did return to the land of the living, to the world of acting and feeling, of touching and being touched. I started living, grievously late, yes, but I did start and still do despite the horrendously late beginning.

But deep old wounds never seem to heal completely and the past has a way of returning in bad times and moments taking the shape of regrets and obsessive analysis of what did go wrong and how much of my best years I really did lose, and how much even in these better times I have lost as the recovery has never been complete and I have never been completely free of my old inadequacies. It is curious how strong this reflex can be and how clearly I can both see the complete fruitlessness of going over these long past issues and nevertheless be unable not to do so.

So then, once again the awful, cul-de-sac of a question: if I should not have lost my away after a series of basically unrelated blows at various crucial stages of my development? How much less pain, how much more happiness and love? A stupid, pointless question.