Regrets; I've had a few -- but then again too few to mention

Sometimes if I don't update for a few days it can start to feel like my last post is just left hanging. Like an awkward pause in conversation, and the last thing you said is left hanging in the air. A passing thought -- that any other time might not even have been noted -- seems like a final statement, a declaration to be repeated day after day. Except it's not. Whoever I was thinking of at the time of my last post (and if anyone is wondering: if you read it, it's not you), it doesn't really matter.

The trouble is, sometimes things don't seem to much move forward. You get up, you go to work, you count down to your break, to your lunch, to time to leave. The the next day, do it all again. Lather, rinse, repeat. The days are punctuated by the changing menu in the canteen.

Financially, I still feel like I'm struggling although my friends think my concerns are unfounded -- Jon laughed at me when I said how much (or how little, to his mind) I had on my credit cards. I like to point out when they start to say I'm lucky that I only have so comparably little on them because of the fucking chavs who broke my jaw and the subsequent compensation pay out. I sometimes wonder if I could go back and relive that night, if I would do it differently. Would I cross the road and avoid them, and so miss out on being beaten to within an inch of my life and the resulting agoraphobia in the days that followed. But keep the debts. Or would I do it the same again, knowing that I'd survive what happened and would be able to pay off credit cards and an overdraft.

I guess the key -- as with anything in my life -- is acceptance. I can't change it. I can't change my past, or any of the number of things I regret. Sometimes before I go to sleep I quietly wish for some kind of miracle, that I'd wake up the morning I was going to Utah -- or the morning before I went to university in Derby. That I would be able to relive those last five, or seven, years. Perhaps powerless to change any international events, but able to recognise the situations when I should have done something differently.

If we could change our decisions, if we could cheat like I always did in the choose-your-own-adventure books -- by keeping my finger in the page with the decision, and returning to it to make a different choice when things went wrong -- would we be the same? Would I still be the person I am today without the experiences that happened to me?

And if I wasn't, would that necessarily be such a bad thing?

One could argue that we -- I -- have a central core, a soul, something that defines my personality. I've often rejected the idea of a soul, and I think with different experiences and circumstances my personality could mould or change and be completely different. I don't know if that's the same for everyone, and I don't know if it's a character defect -- and is even that subject to change?