Perfect contrition vs. perfect despair

At some point in the past year, I really thought that God was asking me to walk away from my Ph.D. thesis, burn all my bridges professionally and start anew somewhere in India. It would have been a ballsy thing to do, because failing to submit would have had very serious repercussions for my department - basically, the department cannot receive funding for two years if more than 40% of funded candidates do not submit, and we were already fairly close to those 40%. I would have been blacklisted forever if I did that, but in my mind it was a bit of an Abraham and Isaac moment.

I ended up not walking away from my Ph.D. and passing my defense a few months later. I was never really sure that this was a real call from God, but I wasn't entirely sure that it wasn't. I tried to discern whether I should have taken this seriously, but deep down I knew I probably wouldn't have done it anyway. At some point I sort-of-prayed that I could not even repent it, since I had no intention of altering my trajectory, or "converting".

I was walking from one place to the other chewing things around in my mind, and I thought that St Peter would probably have given anything to undo his denial, he would have cut off a limb for a chance to undo it, surely he must have had perfect contrition... But we are forced to observe that he did not alter his trajectory when the cock crowed, he did not run after the maid, saying "umm, sorry, I made a mistake, I do know this guy after all", Peter did not have perfect contrition, he weeped out of perfect despair.

I realise that I'm on shaky grounds here. There is undeniably infinite value in "perfect contrition" which is a Roman Catholic concept which states that basically you really should resolve to never sin again, and do everything you can to undo the sin as soon as you can when this is possible. But by the time Peter was forgiven he probably still didn't have perfect contrition, and he had no idea whether, given the chance, he would have the courage not to deny his Lord again. My guess is that he lived with perfect despair for a while. A man in perfect despair who loved Jesus and knew himself to be loved, not insignificantly. A man who was given the power to forgive or retain sins. The one stone on which the church was built.