I regret nothing - except maybe my eyebrows

Do you ever find yourself facing a small annoyance that slightly reroutes your day—then suddenly you're picturing yourself in an eerie scene from Final Destination, narrowly escaping harrowing devastation?
No? Just me then.

I can’t recall when I first noticed this thought loop, but I think it began more as a strategy than an instinctive response—sort of like a positive reframing of an inconvenience. I’d think, Hmm, I wonder how this three-minute delay will change my day. Probably in absolutely no way whatsoever—but still, I continue to have these existential spirals every time I nip back into the house for my sunglasses or spill coffee down my clothes.

But then there’s the big stuff, right? The city you don’t move to. The new job you take. The relationship that ends. Significant life events with the power to shape your future entirely.

I’m obsessed with these sliding doors moments. What’s happening in the parallel lives shaped by all the choices we didn’t make? Who are those versions of ourselves—are their lives better or worse than the ones we’re living? Who do we meet there? What changes us? What hardships do we face? And the biggest mystery of all: Could I have had sensational eyebrows today if I just hadn’t picked up those tweezers in 1998?

The truth is, there are infinite paths and iterations of us all. And I find that both wildly exciting and a little bit sad—not from regret exactly, but from the idea that some of the most cherished people in my life might never have been mine if I hadn’t made some seemingly insignificant choices. And on the other side of that—what has slipped through my fingers?

These questions play like an earworm in my head. And to be clear, I have no regrets. None. Except, perhaps, the fate of my eyebrows. But really, the most terrifying, heartbreaking, cruel, and difficult things I’ve experienced have become my most cherished parts.

Still, my burning questions and vivid daydreams aren’t filled with stories of alternate lives in unknown cities, with different friends and foreign careers—it’s a bit more meta than that. Where my sliding doors fixation really lives is not in the choices I’ve made, but in the thoughts and patterns of thinking that have steered my life.

Whilst navigating the first wave of my premature identity crisis in 2018, my therapist asked me what I liked to do in my free time. My response: Why am I being subjected to such violent and hostile questioning? She continued… hobbies? Interests? And then she laid me out: What did you enjoy when you were little? For the life of me, I couldn’t answer. And it has haunted me since.

As I foraged through my teen and childhood memories for clues to my lost interests—a murky landscape at the best of times—it became alarmingly clear: as far back as I can recall, my appearance and body were a worrisome concern. I knew they were the most important things about me. Of course, no one explicitly told me that—but I knew. Beauty was the most powerful thing a woman could possess. And for those who had it, life seemed better. I saw how women were treated differently—praised, admired. It’s like the whole world just liked them better.

It consumed me. There was little space, thought, or interest in anything else—nor any awareness that it was anything other than the normal inner cogs of a little human girl brain. But when this realisation came to light—circa 2018, identity crisis phase two—I began to consider that perhaps it wasn’t just the way things were. Not normal. And that other people—maybe even other women—lived lives free from this preoccupation, self-objectifying, and ceaseless monitoring.

At first, I was filled with rage and sorrow. How much of my life had been spent—wasted, even—when I could have been living? Enjoying experiences rather than evaluating myself. Knowing myself rather than worrying how I would be perceived. Living in my body instead of loathing it.

So I did what I do best—I sulked with the world. What would and could my life have looked like if I hadn’t spent so much of it enslaved to my appearance? Why me? Why is this so hard? Whose fault is this?

Until I spotted it—the sliding door. Except this time, it wasn’t a door at all. It was a crossroads.

Would I do it differently, if given a do-over? Absolutely not. Because where’s the fun in getting it right the first time?