A question seems to get more interesting as we get older. If I could turn back time, which part of my life would I erase? Which decision would I make differently, which path would I avoid, and which warning would I take more seriously if I had the chance to live it all again?
The obvious assumption is that age brings an ever-growing list of regrets. I have found almost the opposite. The older I become, the less interested I am in rewriting my past and the more interested I am in understanding my relationship with it.
That is not because everything that happened was acceptable; far from it. Some experiences were profoundly damaging, some people should never have crossed my path, and some things changed me in ways I would never have chosen.
The difficulty is that a life is not constructed from separate chapters that can be neatly removed without disturbing everything that follows. Pull one thread from the tapestry, and you never know what else might unravel. There is, however, one part of my history about which I have no such ambivalence.
There is one chapter I would willingly erase
If I could remove one experience from my childhood, I would remove the sexual abuse I experienced when I was seven.
I have no interest in finding something redemptive about that experience. Children should not have to survive sexual abuse, and it should never be reframed as character building or as something that was somehow necessary to produce the adult they eventually became.
Children deserve safety. They deserve adults who protect them rather than exploit them, and when that protection fails, the responsibility belongs entirely to the person who harmed them.
Survivors are sometimes told that what happened made them stronger. I have never been comfortable with that idea. Any strength I developed afterwards came from what I did with my life after something that should never have happened in the first place. The abuse itself deserves no credit.
Would my life have been different without it? Undoubtedly. Would some things have been easier? I believe they would.
If I could hand that chapter back, I would do so without hesitation.
Other painful parts of life are harder to untangle
My first marriage is much more complicated to think about in terms of regret. It was deeply unhappy, and looking back I can see how emotionally damaging it became. There were years and experiences within it that I would never willingly repeat.
Yet that marriage also gave me my son.
At that point, the arithmetic of regret becomes impossible. I cannot wish away a relationship when doing so would require me to imagine a world in which one of the people I love most does not exist.
That does not mean the unhappiness was necessary for me to appreciate my son, nor does his existence retrospectively make a damaging marriage acceptable. It simply demonstrates why rewriting our history becomes so complicated.
Lives are interconnected. A job we hated may have introduced us to somebody who became a lifelong friend. A relationship that should have ended earlier may have taken us somewhere that later mattered enormously. A professional disappointment may have changed our direction and placed opportunities in front of us that we could not have anticipated at the time.
None of this means that painful experiences happen for a reason. I don’t believe we need to give suffering a purpose to make peace with the fact that it happened.
It simply means that changing one part of a life would inevitably change things we might wholeheartedly want to keep.
The nature of regret changes as we get older
When I was younger, I probably spent more time regretting things. These days, I find myself thinking more about things that never happened.
There were opportunities I did not recognise, risks I decided not to take, invitations I declined and projects I postponed because there would surely be more time later. I had conversations I could have had and started things sooner.
Missed opportunities have a peculiar hold over the imagination because they can never be properly tested against reality. We know what happened on the road we actually travelled. The alternative road exists only in our imagination, where it can remain conveniently free of traffic, potholes and bad decisions.
I can wonder what would have happened if I had accepted a particular opportunity, moved somewhere else, started writing sooner or been braver at a particular moment. What I cannot know is what that alternative life would actually have contained.
Perhaps it would have been wonderful. Perhaps it would have produced an entirely different collection of regrets.
Our imagined lives have an unfair advantage over the one we actually lived because imagination is not obliged to include consequences.
Memory is not an objective record of our lives
Another complication arises when we look backwards. Memory is not a perfect recording of what happened.
We reconstruct memories, and our present knowledge, emotions, and beliefs can influence how we understand events from years earlier. This does not mean that significant experiences were imaginary or that memory is inherently untrustworthy. It means remembering is more dynamic than retrieving an untouched file from storage.
As a therapist, I find this particularly important because our relationship with a memory can change even when the historical facts cannot.
This is one reason I am interested in memory reconsolidation. Under certain conditions, emotional learning associated with an old experience may be updated. The event remains part of our autobiographical history, but the emotional response attached to it does not necessarily have to remain exactly as it was.
For somebody carrying a painful memory, that distinction can be profound. Therapy cannot travel backwards and make something not have happened. What it may sometimes help to change is the extent to which that experience continues to determine what happens emotionally in the present.
The facts remain part of the past. They do not necessarily have to retain the same power over the present.
Making peace with something is not approving of it
People sometimes confuse acceptance with approval, as though making peace with the past requires us to decide that everything happened as it should have.
I do not believe that at all.
Some things in my life were wrong then and remain wrong now. Understanding why somebody behaved as they did does not oblige me to excuse the behaviour. Recognising that something cannot be changed does not require me to pretend that I am pleased it happened.
Peace, for me, means something different. It means reducing the amount of present life I have to surrender to something that has already taken enough.
That distinction took me a long time to understand. There are memories I would never have chosen, losses I wish had never occurred and people whose behaviour I may never completely comprehend. I do not want those experiences to remain permanently at the centre of my identity.
They belong to my history. They do not have to own the rest of it.
We rarely become the people we expected to become
Very few of us arrive in later life exactly where our younger selves imagined we would.
Careers take unexpected turns. Relationships begin and end. Our bodies change and sometimes our health changes with them. People we assumed would always be there disappear from our lives, while people we could never have anticipated become important to us.
Ambitions change too. Some things that once seemed desperately important gradually lose their appeal, while entirely new ambitions can emerge in our sixties, seventies and beyond.
Perhaps that is one reason I have become less interested in editing the past and more interested in what I can still do now and in the future.
I still have work I want to do, books I want to write, conversations I want to have, and people I want to love well. None of that requires my past to have been perfect.
Living in the present is harder than it sounds
We are constantly advised to live in the present moment, as though this were simply a decision we could make over breakfast.
It is much harder than that.
Human beings naturally revisit previous experiences, particularly painful ones. We replay conversations, reconsider decisions and imagine what we should have said or done differently. Some of that reflection is useful because the past teaches us. The difficulty begins when reflection becomes repetition without resolution. Learning from an experience differs from reliving it repeatedly.
Going over an old conversation for the hundredth time won’t change what was said. Mentally constructing a better ending to a relationship will not change how it actually ended. Punishing yourself for a decision made twenty years ago does not give your younger self access to what you know today.
At some point, the past can begin consuming time that belongs to the present.
Living in the present does not require forgetting what happened. It means recognising when history has already taken more than its fair share of today’s attention.
If I really could turn back time
If somebody genuinely offered me the opportunity to rewrite my life, I suspect I would hesitate much longer than I once imagined.
I would erase the childhood abuse. On that, I have no uncertainty.
Beyond that, the choices become much harder. I cannot remove an unhappy marriage without encountering the impossible thought of removing my son. I cannot know what a professional disappointment prevented without also knowing what it made possible. I cannot assume that every opportunity I missed would have led somewhere better.
Perhaps this is one of the unexpected changes that comes with getting older. The desire to create a perfect alternative history becomes less compelling because you begin to understand that no such history exists.
This does not require us to romanticise suffering or pretend that everything happens for a reason. Some things are simply terrible. Some choices were mistakes. Some opportunities were really missed, and sometimes we stayed too long, left too soon, or trusted somebody who did not deserve it.
Acceptance does not require rewriting any of that. It asks something more difficult: can I acknowledge what happened without requiring the rest of my life to remain in conversation with it?
As I approach another decade of my life, that question interests me far more than constructing an imaginary version of the past.
I am less inclined to ask myself what might have happened if I had made a different decision thirty or forty years ago. I am more interested in whether I am paying sufficient attention to the decisions still available to me now.
I could still miss opportunities. There are still things I could postpone unnecessarily, conversations I could avoid and experiences I could talk myself out of because they feel inconvenient or uncertain.
Perhaps the most useful thing regret can do is not send us backwards at all.
Perhaps it can make us more awake to the life that is still happening.
If I could turn back time, there is one part of my past I would unquestionably erase. For most of the rest, I am increasingly willing to leave history where it belongs.
The question I want to ask now is not, “What would I change if I could live it all again?”
It is, “What do I still want to do with the life I have now?” At this stage of my life, that feels like the question worth answering.
