If I had it to do over again....

I wouldn't.

This month, a question meme made its way through livejournal.  Many of the questions posed to me were fandom questions, because most of my friends there are fandom friends: BSG, XF, BtVS, Farscape.  

One of the non-fandom questions this month was:  You have one real-life do-over.  Do you use it?  And when?

In fiction, I'm a fan of a character saying something to the effect of, "We got off on the wrong foot, so let's start over.  Hi, I'm x."

In real life, not so much.  Not because I've never done anything I regret, but because everything I've done or not done has brought me here today.  I may not be terribly enamored of where my life is at the moment, but I like myself, and each and every choice I made along the way had something to do with molding me into this particular me.  And my life being where it is at the moment is an opportunity for change and growth.  Neither growth nor change has been something I handled particularly gracefully in the past, but that's the joy of aging, I suppose, is the ability to look back and see that even the bad things have good consequences sometimes, and that the good things I worked so hard to achieve didn't always get me where I thought they would.  So growth and change.

I might like to have made more responsible choices with the money I had after selling the land I inherited (I'm sure Mrs. Potatohead would have appreciated us being less hand-to-mouth for those years.), but I did the best I could with the budgeting skills I had at the time (facility with math does not equate to understanding the concept of budgeting, parents).  It was so many small choices leading up to "Oh, wow.  Where did all that money go?"  (not that it was a lot, but more than I'd ever had at any one time before)  When I win the lottery, oh, the things I know now...

I'd rather go forward, using the things I've learned, sometimes at great expense, to make the future better.  I can't change the past, no matter how much I might wish to.