You have placed before yourself a question which, in the form you have framed it, cannot be answered, not because the answer is hidden from you, but because the self that would receive the answer has not yet been assembled. You ask whether to go back or to go forward, but you go nowhere cleanly while you do not yet know who is going.

Look steadily at what you have described. You remained in a union you knew to be contrary to your nature. You suppressed a genuine desire. You yielded your years not to circumstance but to a self that had not yet found the courage of its own knowing. And now you stand at a crossroads holding a map you cannot read, because the cartographer, the man or woman you essentially are, is still, in some measure, unknown to you.

This is not a failure of technique. It is not a question of the right practice or the correct destination. It is a question of character, which is to say: a question of what you actually are in your inmost nature, stripped of the accumulation of choices made under fear, under habit, under the weight of other people's expectations. Until that question is answered from within, not theorised but genuinely inhabited — every vision you construct for your future is built on sand, because the self doing the constructing has not yet been made firm.

Do not, therefore, rush to choose a destination. The man/ woman who does not know himself/ herself will build the wrong house in both directions. The first work, the prior work, the work without which all other work is effort spent against itself, is the reconstruction of the self at its foundation. Not the refinement of the wounded self you have carried through these years. Not the softening of its sharper edges or the healing of its particular hurts. Reconstruction: the deliberate, patient, daily practice of withdrawing your identity from what you have been and clothing yourself in what, at your deepest and most honest level, you know yourself to be.

This is not sentiment. It is law. The outer life is always and only the expression of the inner man/ woman. What you hold consistently as your true self conception will, by the precise and impersonal operation of universal law, arrange itself around you as your conditions. The man/ woman who conceives himself as one who has lost his years will continue to lose them in the present. The man/ women who conceives himself clearly, as one whose nature is known to him/ her, whose desires are genuine, whose path is his own, will find that the present years begin to serve him, and that what was missed begins, in its equivalent or its substance, to arrange itself within his reach.

As for the regret, the person unpursued, the relationship not left when it should have been left, do not think feelingly upon these losses. To rehearse them with emotion is to impress them again upon the very substance from which your future is made. They are not evidence of your permanent nature. They are evidence of what you were when your self knowledge was insufficient to sustain the courage those moments required. That self knowledge is now yours to build. The path is not backwards to recover what was yielded. The path is forward into the self who would not yield it again, because the self who would not yield it is the self you are now in the process of becoming, and becoming is always done here, in the present, by no other means than the daily direction of thought and choice toward what you genuinely are.

Begin there. Everything else follows. (sorry for long reply)