I'm afraid I can't relate. I initially invested a lot of time in my first choice of career (over a decade) and just left last year. I walked out the door, said goodbye, and the next day it was out of my mind. That being said, I think the key is keeping a strong mental separation between "passion for a field of work" and "predetermined path by society to actualize that passion". The latter, in my opinion, is something that one should never get attached to.
If you wanted to become a doctor, say, and flunked out of school, how would you find another path to become a doctor; start again in another country? Sometimes the cost of failure is high.
It is, but sometimes there is no choice but to do something else. And the cost of my own "failure" was high, though I wouldn't label it as a failure. That word is barely in my vocabulary...I prefer to consider it as a learning experience.
