...that I can be strange. When I was younger, say back in high school days, it did bother me. Now I'm fully one with my strangeness, and that's perfectly okay. That's one of the benefits to "growing up" I suppose: you finally learn to accept yourself for you who really are inside. Maybe this is why so many people say things like "I wish I could go back in time to when...". For me, I'd re-do all four years of high school. There is so much I'd do differently. Now I'm not talking about regrets here at all; in fact if I ponder this for a moment, I realize that what I was and went through before brought me to where I am now.
Therein lies the paradox: if you actually could go back and change who you were back in some time in the past, it would end up changing you now.
Anyway, putting the paradox aside for a moment, I'm actually pretty happy about my experiences in college, and grade school really doesn't matter all that much in the grand scheme of things, so it's definitely high school for my time machine. Now what would I change?
Confidence. I'd be far more confident of myself and my abilities. Simply put, I was my own worst enemy. I was 6'3.5", 175 lbs (yes, I was a board) of noodle. One of the things I've learned in the working world all these years is that people sense confidence in the same way that a dog senses fear. Having it creates it. This is not to say that I'm completely confident in myself now, but I am a hell of a lot better than I was then. Anyway, I don't know that I was ever taught to be confident in myself. Fortunately for me, this lack of confidence never led me to really, really bad choices. Mistakes? Yes, but no horrible life-changing-for-the-bad choices.
I think just going back, re-living those experiences but injecting just a bit more self-confidence in to the mix would make all of the difference.
So much for that. In the real world there are no time-machines. What we do have is the present, and we can always focus on changing it for the better.
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