Would you go back and change things?

Today my manager and friend John mentioned how he had been thinking about whether or not he would go back into his life and redo things. He said that today was the first time he felt that he wouldn't want to go back.

Would I go back? Would I want to change the way things happened? There’s several different ways “going back” could be interpreted. If I went back with all the knowledge I have now, back to being a child, it might cause more harm than good. I would be too enlightened, an adult in a child’s body. I would become segregated (possibly from my own volition or by simple ‘she behaves differently, I won’t be friends with her’). If I, as I am today, could go back and visit my child self as an apparition of sorts, I may be more inclined to do so. I could choose the particular moments where I would visit myself, the most prime moments when I need that slap in the face.

At the same time though, if I did have that slapping awake moment, I don’t think that I would have learned half as much as I did learn. And I’d say that a majority of the times when I've been going on a path that inevitably led to some kind of pain for me, my friends or my family was there telling me to watch out, don’t do that, the same things that I would say if I went back. I suppose that this is more of a question of regret than anything else. Do I regret the things that happened in my past and if I had the possibility would I change it so I didn't have to go through those things? John said to me that going back might end up making things worse than they already were, but I said back to him that it might also make it better. In my personal opinion though, I would agree with him. Of all the negative experiences I've had up to this point, with love and life and responsibility and whatever else, I can’t really say I regret them all enough for me to want to go back and erase them. Sure, the situations that lead up to my lesson learned were god awful and I wish that they did not have to be so drastic and painful for me, but either way I learned that life lesson that someone telling me ‘don’t do that you’ll regret it’ never taught. Perhaps if I were to go back though, that may be so startling to me that I might actually listen. But so many other factors would come into play then, and I don’t know if the way I carry myself will really be affected by that as much as I think. I might just stick to my guns anyway.

Perhaps if I did go back, without any kind of knowledge from the future, I would go through other types of experiences that would lead me to the same point that I am now, just without as much pain. If I were more receptive of those people warning me, things may have been easier on me back then. But then I would be a different person altogether, me not listening was part of my character. It may not be a good trait but that’s what makes me, me. And at this point, I've kind of learned not to just throw away all that when they tell me “AMANDA don’t fucking do that”.

John went on to muse about how this now might be another period of us going back, perhaps for the third or fourth time. We just might not know. It’s interesting, because I know he’s an atheist. But I, as an agnostic, also wonder about that. Maybe when we die we get a choice, do you want to go again? Forget everything? This is a much deeper subject, one that I’m not totally prepared to delve into for now. Death is still such a large fear for me.

After some more conversation the question of my scholarly preoccupations arose and we discussed my reasons for studying psychology. I told him that I am extremely interested in sciences, I just didn't pay enough attention in high school to make that future as possible as I would like. He shared this sentiment, saying that once he started telling himself “I’m not good at that” he stopped trying. Just because you’re good at one thing doesn't mean you can’t be good at other things, I told myself “I’m good at English, so I don’t need to try at math.” If I were to go back and change anything at all, it would be this: put in that extra effort, don’t listen to that voice in your head that says you can’t do it, that you can’t be better. Put in the extra effort that you reserved for college. Knowledge is not predetermined, it is a set of building blocks and you’re in control of how you build it up. I did a whole lot of nothing growing up, and for not very good reasons. I could have taken that AP Physics class. I could have. I made too many excuses. My dream was to work for NASA, to pursue that final frontier…It still is. I know my future is not finite now, if I wanted it enough I could do it…I just feel as though my life has fallen into a pattern for my EWM/Psychology life path. For now.

I don’t think I would go back. My experiences have made me who I am. My experiences happened in the first place because of who I am, and they just continue to develop me. I know I’d learn one way or another, but I’m happy with how things have gone so far.