(Consider this a warning, both for the length of this post, and for triggering material)
If I could go back in time, there are not many things I'd change. Mostly because you can't know how little changes might affect you, and in making changes to my past, I'd be killing myself. Which is all nonsense, as every time I see sci-fi shows where someone is faced with helping the heroes put back the past, they struggle with the knowledge that they will kill themselves in the process, and I think, "Well that's dumb. Don't they know it's better this way?" But that's not the point. Better or not, at the end, you become a new person, and whoever you would have become down that alternate timeline, whether they liked themselves or not, whether they were a good person or not, they are dead. Chances are, it was not so straightforward - everyone is a mix of good and bad, everyone likes and dislikes themselves or part of themselves at times. Maybe weathering this battle made them better and stronger, and although the whole world is better because the battle never happened, something will be missing from this version of that one person. They are dead.
If I could go back in time, I've said before that there were things about my wedding I would change. Certain things that I had fixed in my head that were unnecessary, because at the time, I was a staunch traditionalist. I still am, in my way. I debated for a long time whether to have my mom or my step-dad walk me down the aisle. My mom has been there for me forever. She's always been my primary parent. At the same time, my step-dad and I had formed a close bond, and he had been my dad for 20 years. I chose him, in my own way symbolically adopting him. I chose him.
When he walked me down the aisle, he was already cheating on my mom. He was already in the process of ruining everything. When it all came out, the world fell down around my ears - the narratives I'd built up about second chances, about religious conversion, about all kinds of things. For those reasons, I would go back and not choose him. For a while, I thought I should have chosen my mom. Now, I think, I would choose no one.
