If you could edit your past, what would you change?

Originally asked

The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A

Repeated verbatim in The Guardian's long-running Saturday Q&A; two publisher-hosted examples establish recurrence.

You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.

Recorded Heather Graham said elsewhere, not written here
I spent too many years being hard on myself, like a drill sergeant in my head. I thought that if I was hard on myself, I’d get more results, but I now know that’s not true.

The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 19 March 2016 source ↗

Others on this question

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Gloria Steinem Writer and feminist organiser
Since hostile people still call me a former Playboy Bunny, even at 82, I probably shouldn’t have done that in my youth, even to write an exposé. And since a couple of times they’ve also referred to me as a former CIA agent, because I went to two Soviet-era communist youth festivals, I probably shouldn’t have done that, either. Yet if I hadn’t done both, I might have judged other people by such empty symbols, too.
Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 4 March 2017 source ↗
Adrian Scarborough British actor
The first 12 years of school. I was very unhappy. I was not academic, so I played the fool till I was 16.
Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 12 February 2022 source ↗
Keir Starmer
My mum died in her early 70s, and for the last six or seven years of her life she couldn’t move, didn’t speak. By the time our children were born, she was too ill to communicate. I haven’t many regrets in life, but I do regret that they never got to know her, even though she was still alive for a few years. They couldn’t see her warmth, her spirit, her courage.
Recorded The Q&A, The Guardian, 19 August 2023 source ↗

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