If I Could Rewrite My Canon Events

I reckon that mistakes aren't totally avoidable in life. We learn from them sometimes. If I could go back in time, though, I would leave my eight-year-old self a blueprint not to make certain mistakes. I think things would be much more different in the present. How different exactly is the million-dollar question.

I'll be honest and say that I really don't like to make mistakes. I tend to want to beat myself up for making even the most negligible error. It's not that I want everything to be perfect, but precision is always desirable for me. Somehow, the mistakes happen anyway, and sometimes even more when I try too hard.

Something that I have learnt to do, however, is to forgive myself so quickly and bounce back from the mistakes I make. At some point, I began to even question myself if it wasn't actually complacency. Deeper introspection would often make me realise how it's much better to embrace what was, live in the present, and fuss less about the future.

I still have my memory, however, and even my heart. The financial mistakes, like losing all of my savings to one ponzi scheme, the academic ones where I underperformed or so, the relationship ones like when I dated the ghost that stood me up, wrong interpersonal interactions—I never really forget them, and sometimes they'd spring up again. Travelling back in time to prevent them sure seems like a golden ticket to a near-perfect life.

If I do travel back in time to prevent every single mistake that I have ever made, I could have them all fixed, quite alright, but something else would happen. A new timeline would be created. A new timeline where I didn't make all of those "certain mistakes," but—and here's the catch—I would have made a completely new set of mistakes that I probably never did or would in the original timeline. Would the new set of mistakes be worse or better? I never can say.

Changing the past never really goes well, as we have seen in countless time travel films. Something always goes wrong. And even if nothing goes wrong in particular, the present surely never remains the same. So rather than being my humble 5'7 self, I could turn out to be 4'11 or maybe 6'2. Who nose? 🐽

Everything that has been and happened in my life, including the mistakes, I consider to be canon events. In the animation, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, canon events were illustrated as moments in every Spiderman's life where something really tragic happened—say, losing a loved one—and that somehow shaped them into becoming who they became—the heroes in their worlds.

So, thinking again, how different would things be in the present if I could travel back in time to leave my eight-year-old self a blueprint not to make "certain mistakes?" I don't know. What I do know is that every single one of them has shaped me into who I am. The canon events led me up to this point. What do you have to say about your canon events?

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