Would You Choose the Same Life Twice?
The heartbreaking truth about wanting a do-over
I had a birthday this week.
Last year, my daughter did me a solid and pulled a numeric candle-flip hack that sliced ten years off my age in one glorious sleight of hand.
This year? Double digits—so no amount of inversion can disguise the truth, and next year’s flip will unfortunately catapult me straight into early-bird dinner discounts and an AARP tote bag.
Midlife birthdays have a way of tapping you on the shoulder with that gentle reminder: Hey, kid—the roller-coaster peak is behind you.
Maybe that’s why this meme hit me like a punch-line wrapped in an existential crisis:
“You wake up and it’s 1985. The last 40 years were just a dream. What’s the first thing you’d do?”
Oof.
Spoiler alert: waking up in 1985 does not return me to cozy footie pajamas. Think fluorescent leg-warmers,
big hair fortified with Aqua Net,
and a Walkman blasting A-ha’s “Take On Me” on an endless loop.
My first public-service announcement to 15-year-old me would be: “You are going to regret your fashion choices—drop the hairspray, friend.”
Of course the low-hanging fruit of the do-over fantasy is obvious: Buy Microsoft. Load up on Amazon. Tell my future therapist to clear her schedule. But once the stock jokes fade, a harder question surfaces:
If you could really rewind four decades, what would you change?
Because of vs. In Spite Of
Instinctively, I want to spare myself the bruises—the wrong marriage, the catastrophe hotel, the betrayals that still echo at 2 a.m. Surely life minus those disasters would feel lighter, safer, happier … right?
That’s where pop culture taps my shoulder. In The Butterfly Effect Ashton Kutcher keeps “fixing” an obviously horrific moment in time only to watch reality deform in fresh and grotesque ways. In the series The Flash Barry time travel to the past to prevent his mother’s death (no brainer, right?) but snaps the timeline so badly he spends three seasons stitching reality back together. Lesson: tweak one thread and the whole tapestry misbehaves.
Which leaves me with the paradox that perhaps haunts many of us:
Am I who I am because of my past … or in spite of it?
Would I still have my exact two children—the ones whose very existence recalibrated my universe—if I’d dodged that disastrous marriage? Would the voice I write with still carry the same grit and tenderness if my earlier life had been one long, safe cul-de-sac?
And—the deeper sting—if I’m not thrilled with where I’ve landed, does that make every hard mile a cosmic accounting error?
The Illusion of Straight Lines
Here’s what the meme really exposes: our hunger for a neat, linear universe—pull one thread, predict precisely which tapestry square unravels.
Cause → effect. Regret → redo → bliss.
But life isn’t a sweater; it’s a spiderweb. Touch any strand and vibrations ripple everywhere, some felt, most hidden. Change the wrong-marriage thread and maybe you lose the kids. Spare yourself the hotel fire and perhaps you also erase the grit that keeps your writing honest.
That recognition leaves me in a strange cocktail of overwhelm and awe. Overwhelm, because it means I can never fully map the consequences of any choice—past or present. Awe, because if the web is that complex, then every ordinary action is laced with wild, unforeseeable potential.
So, perhaps the real lesson isn’t “Fix the past carefully.”
It’s “Loosen your grip on certainty.”
If I can’t predict which thread leads where in hindsight, I definitely can’t claim clairvoyance about today’s choices. For all I know, forty years from now I’ll open my holo-feed and laugh that fifty-five-year-old Maureen still has questionable fashion sense—while some tiny decision I make tomorrow is blossoming into an unforeseen miracle.
In a nonlinear universe, humility might be the highest form of wisdom—and wonder the safest wager we can make.
In a nonlinear universe, humility might be the highest form of wisdom—and wonder the safest wager we can make.
Who I Became (and Who I Still Struggle to Love)
However, there is a deeper pain less obvious but brutal when brought to light: What about who I am now is so “not ok” that I want a rewrite.
But the real question isn’t about time travel.
It’s about self-love.
Would I still want a do-over if I truly cherished the woman I’ve become?
That’s the sharp edge under the meme.
Because when you don’t fully love where you are, it’s so easy to treat your past like a bad investment—trying to recalculate the cost, tally up the lost time, run the numbers again hoping the math will come out differently.
But I don’t want to live my life like a balance sheet.
I want to live it like a work of art.
Messy, raw, unrepeatable.
And yet—I still catch myself wishing I could go back and tweak the lines.
Still bargaining with the past, as if perfection were the path to peace.
But maybe the real soul work isn’t going back.
It’s standing in the mirror—at fifty-five, or fifteen—and saying:
“Even if it hurt, even if it didn’t go how I hoped—I’m still glad I became you.”
Maybe that’s the moment the healing starts:
When I can meet that blue-eyeshadow girl in the hallway of time and, instead of yanking the Aqua Net from her hand, look her straight in the eyes and say:
“I wouldn’t change a single thing—not because it was easy, but because you deserved to live it all and still end up loved.”
That’s the ache, isn’t it?
To reach a place where the very thought of a do-over feels unnecessary—where we could choose the same winding road, knowing the bruises, and still whisper yes.
That’s not cheap positivity. That’s spiritual physics.
It requires a radical trust that somehow in a way none of us may ever get to perceive our messy lives were somehow necessary exactly as they happened.
That the worth and measure of our beingness is not in spite of the pain but mysteriously threaded through it.
I’m not fully there yet. Some mornings I still bargain with ghosts.
But on the best days—on cliff-edge mornings when sunlight hits the ocean just right—I sense the possibility:
What if the true second chance is not in rewriting history, but in loving it so thoroughly that we’d live it again?
That, I think, is the koan the meme was really asking—
and the only answer that lets the birthday candles glow without flinching.
So, I’ll leave the question open, because koans don’t close neatly:
Could you—given the chance—love your life enough to walk the same road twice?
If not yet, what tender truth still needs a seat at the table before you can say yes?
I’ll be listening—for your answers, and for my own.
Please put them in the comments below!
Beautiful, Maureen, glad you chose Door Number One. Great topic, great post, great premise. Happy Birthday Gemini! (from a fellow twin). Enjoy your summer.
Life’s balance sheet.
That’s the go-to phrase, right? The nagging ongoing audit of your life. And I do it all the time—whether it’s morning, midday, or 3 a.m. (my habitual favorite), I’ll run an internal audit of my life’s accomplishments, dredging up the good, the bad, and the truly ugly of it all. And like that 2 a.m. line of coke with a tequila chaser, I know it’s a really bad idea, but at the same time, it’s oh so self-indulgent. And the not-so-funny thing is, it’s often easier to dredge up the debits than it is the credits of my life. Whether it’s the dysfunctional home life, the drugs that carried me through the ’80s, the booze that carried me through the ’90s and 2000s, the lost opportunities, the lost relationships, the loss of potential, and the loss of time—these shadows have all spent a lot of time in my head.
But you know, everyone has a balance sheet of sorts. Everyone has a mental list of accounts that they reconcile. However, in my maturing (said cheekily) years, I’ve discovered that the trick is in developing a [mental] Controller who can cook the books. Meaning, bring in that resource in your head that dampens all the terrible shit you dredge up and instead makes room for you to focus on what has gone right in your life either by design or pure luck. A wise manager once told me that the most powerful person in the company was the Controller (and I believe it).
Life is a pizza party.
I’ll use this analogy in the context of motorcycling. On a bike, you depend on several factors: the condition of the bike, engine, tires, weather, road conditions, travel speed and, importantly, skill. You imagine that you are throwing a pizza party and have invited all the aforementioned dependencies for dinner. The rule for this dinner, however, is that you can never run out of pizza. To run out of pizza means that one of the dependencies goes hungry—and you may crash. So always have enough pizza left over in the box to accommodate that unexpected guest: the gravel in the road, the car that turns out in front of you, the dog that runs across the road. Accordingly, never ride to 100% of your (or the bike’s) limits, as you need to be able to take on that unforeseen party crasher.
And if you extend that to how we deal with our past, present, and uncertain futures, then the same analogy applies. Make sure your party has enough pizza to accommodate all of it, in addition to everything that’s yet to happen. All the abuse, all the failures, death, loves lost, the things that can never be reconciled, wasted time… take it all and force it on an Atkins diet. Then get that same Controller to invite the guests you actually want to feed: the loves of your life, your kids, the friends who are still with you, the adventures, all the things that actually went right—and focus on those guests instead. Feed them lots of pizza (but don’t forget to leave some left in the box— you never know who’s about to show up).