There are some people who say that if they were to live their lives over, they wouldn't change a thing. I find it hard to believe that anyone is that content with their life. I will tell you there would definitely be a few changes I would make in mine.
For this post, I am setting down some ground rules for how people in general should be able to re-live their lives, although I would likely be the only one who follows them. The first is that you cannot do anything unethical that will purposefully alter your destiny. This means that you cannot know the winning lottery numbers on a particular date. You cannot do something to someone you know is going to be chosen over you in a certain situation in order to permit you to move ahead. You also cannot do something that would keep your parents from creating younger brothers and sisters. You cannot run away from home to do something like join a teen punk band in LA until you turn 18 (unless you already did that the first time around).
Again, those are things that would significantly alter your destiny. If you want to re-live your life a little on the wild side with some petty crimes, like driving your car a little faster, doing some shoplifting, getting in a few fights, yes, you could do that.
Also, you are allowed to make changes in some of your life's major choices. Like, where you go to college, what you would study, whether to go to college, whether to hook up with a certain person, whether to marry them, and whether to have children with them. These do not require any breach of ethics.
With that exposition out of the way, here is the main thing I would change: I would keep my mouth shut a lot more often. I believe that a lot of what makes me appear to be a loser to other people while I was growing up had to do with the things I said. I didn't seem to care if what I said hurt anyone or wasn't true. I actually appeared to lack a tact filter. I had a tendency to say the wrong thing at the wrong time for the sake of trying to be funny. I now know that this was probably related to my Asperger's. I wasn't able to control it while I was growing up. I'm able to somewhat control it now, but I will still occasionally say something absurd that will change people's perspective of me.
I also felt compelled to try to answer every single question my teachers asked the class. I'll bet this made me look like a real twerp. I do wish that one of my teachers had taken me aside and told me to cut it out and to let other members of the class try to answer more often. If given the chance to do it over, I would probably just skulk in the back of the classroom and never take part. The only bad thing about this is that I know that if I wasn't more active in class, my academic performance in high school likely would have suffered and that would create other problems down the line.
Another thing I would change is that I wouldn't watch so much TV. However, when I was growing up, there wasn't much else to do in my little town. If I was addicted to TV, it was again probably due to my Asperger's. I don't like blaming everything on that, but it seems to be responsible for a lot of the problems I had in my past.
As to whether I would go to the same college, I am rather torn. I went to major in Radio/TV Communications at Eastern New Mexico University, which had a GREAT department. The only problem was that the main focus was on producing news and not entertainment. While I am grateful for the news experience because it helped me land a full-time job as a newsradio reporter much later in life, that wasn't why I majored in Radio/TV and there was no one qualified to advise me in the career direction I wanted to take. None of the professors would even advise me to seek out someplace like UCLA or something. (I guess they couldn't, because student retention was a big issue at the college.) The only reason I would go back to ENMU on a second run-through of my life is to keep my friendship with one of the best friends I have ever had. I will likely go into greater detail about this friend much later in this blog.
After that, there would definitely be jobs I would want to avoid and other jobs I would try to get much earlier to provide me with enough seniority to avoid layoffs that occurred later on. Maybe I wouldn't accept that transfer to California that I got. Who knows how I would relive my adult life? Who knows which relationships I would avoid? Which ones would I work harder on?
Re-living your life means that you can avoid certain mistakes. However, it also means that you may have a whole bunch of new mistakes to replace the old ones. Can you really make your life better by trying to avoid those mistakes? I know I could improve my relationships with people by not trying to prove something every time I open my mouth. But would it make my life better? Probably, but we can only deal with our lives on the first go-round. No one really gets a second chance.
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