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.
I sometimes wish I had had the courage to be a politician – but I made the decision to be a human rights defender instead. I realised I cannot be both at the same time, because they may be incompatible.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 7 March 2020 source ↗
I’d take back some dumb shit I said when I had no audience and found that being shocking made people laugh.
I’d have reported the tutor who asked me to read an essay to him sitting on the toilet as he lay soaping himself in the bath.
Several haircuts and my belly-button piercing.
I could have done without being sexually assaulted, or having an eating disorder, or pushing myself to breaking point, but every chapter of my life brought me here.
The climate catastrophe.
Walking in the rainforest with my mother, back in Nicaragua. She loved it, and inspired me to devote much of my life to protecting the environment.
I was brought up Catholic, to believe that marriage is for life. And we failed.
More sleep, less stress.
To my daughter, because she felt that I spent too much time saving other children. I would go to war zones and travel the world for human rights work, and she was missing me.
Laura Kenny, Romola Garai, Nuala McGovern, Mandy Patinkin, Adrian Scarborough, Esther Rantzen
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