SP
I would be a bit nicer to myself.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 28 July 2018 source ↗
The question
If you could revise one chapter of 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.
Others on this question
View all 203 →
Jessica Brown Findlay
English actress
My password. [In 2014, Brown Findlay’s iCloud account was hacked.]
Vicky McClure
English actress
I wasted a year doing nothing at 18. I got with a guy and just wanted to hang out. It didn’t do me any favours.
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.
Eve Ensler
American playwright, performer, feminist, and activist
I would have honoured my body, I would have lived inside it, cherished it and protected it.
More from Sara Pascoe
View profile →I didn’t learn to be intimate with people until I was in my 20s, so I was a very bad friend in my teens. There was a girl I was best friends with at college; I always used to kiss the boys she liked. I’d like to apologise to her.
Nothing – I don’t like music. I want my funeral to be uncomfortably quiet.
Ten years ago, I went to visit my dad in Australia. I walked to the edge of a cliff and looked over and tripped. I righted myself but my head was over the edge. No one saw it.
To be looked at.
Cleaning toilets at McDonald’s when I was 16.
My A-level results - I got two Cs and an A. I had applied to do philosophy at Cambridge, and thought my life was over.
More on failure & regret
- What disappointment has stayed with you longest? 367 answers
- Who deserves an apology from you, and for what? 209 answers
- What is the harshest thing anyone has said to you? 122 answers
- When were you most embarrassed? 122 answers
- How has a setback or failure set you up for later success? 69 answers
- What is the hardest thing that has happened to you, and what did you carry out of it? 35 answers
Also answered this
Lionel Shriver, Paterson Joseph, Adam Kay, Gregg Wallace, Ian McEwan, Jack Whitehall
Search the directory for somebody in particular.
Explore further
- All failure & regret questions
- The The Q&A questionnaire — 25 questions from the same format
- Explore the archive — by field, age, era, and subject