Do I get to keep all my current knowledge if I go back and change things? If so, I’d go back to May 5th, 2008. That was the day I decided to stop my through-hike of the Appalachian Trail because I thought I needed to go back home and enroll in college courses for the fall.
In hindsight, college was a huge waste of time that left me depressed and in debt. Thankfully an old Army buddy turned me on to a good job that got my life back on track, but it was a rough few years.
If I had stayed and finished the hike, I could have started that job years earlier, banked a hefty salary, and be that much closer to an earlier retirement now.
No, but you would know you made a decision based on all the information you had.
There’s probably a ton of decisions that I could change, but one of them would be not to join the military and to go to college instead for meteorology. I don’t know where I would be now, maybe in debt and stuck, or maybe really enjoying a career in a field I love. Regardless, it would be interesting.
Otherwise, to not accept the proposal from my then boyfriend. Had we broken up, I feel like I would have figured out my sexuality earlier and potentially been happier. But instead, I’m facing down a divorce and restarting my life all over.
Have you learned nothing from science fiction? You can’t go messing with the past. Nothing good can come from destabilizing the timeline.
I honestly don’t know. There are a lot of things that happened in my life that sucked. Things I did or things I didn’t do, and far more that were more or less outside my control. The thing is, is that I keep bumping into really good things in life that probably wouldn’t have happened without going through the crap first. A small example is that I worked a crap job, slowly climbed the ladder a bit, worked… okay but it stagnated. We got bought and at the same time I got a job offer elsewhere. Cool–but that job offer turned out to be an absolute nightmare. I jumped ship immediately and came crawling back to my former job.
A lot of pain, a lot of emotional turmoil, wrapped up in ALL of that. But in the end I wound up making more money than ever, and learning new skills that I’m way more passionate about. So a net win. But I did have to go through crap to get here.
This just keeps happening. Over and over, on small scales and big. So as much as I hate the bad stuff, I probably wouldn’t change a thing. I like the good stuff too much.
