More than anything, I want to go back. Regain my innocence. Regain my hope. Take a different path through life. Never see the things I’ve seen, never discover the things I know. Be an optimist till my dying die, even in the face of death.
There’s no going back. There’s only forward. Even if you could somehow transport yourself to a past setting and time, you would remain who you are now moving forward. You couldn’t transport yourself back into your former self, without replacing that self. There may in some sense be the past “you” that still exists, somewhere. But there is no way of inhabiting it. There is no spirit, no essence you could extract from yourself now and implant back in to that past self.
Even if you could somehow re-sculpt your current brain and body to resemble that past self, removing all negative memories, guilt & shame, and construct an environment around yourself that perfectly shielded you from the reality… it wouldn’t be “you” inhabiting that charmed life. It would be a being composed of some of the same matter, DNA, character traits etc. But it wouldn’t be “you”, in the sense of this present being who suffers and longs for the past. Wipe all that from the mind, and you cease to be.
The self-hatred, the guilt, the shame, the regret, the despair… are an integral part of this identity. Remove them, along with the memories & weaknesses that caused them… and you don’t have a being that’s recognisably “me”. So what would be the point? I might as well feed my body into the de-atomiser and create someone entirely different. There’s nothing that special about my DNA.
So there’s no going back. No return to innocence. Probably no hope, barring some pretty significant mental changes. The hope is in ending my existence. Ceasing to be. Returning my body to the planet, in the hopes it makes something better of it in future.
But this would require letting go of longing, of attachment to what used to be, and what could’ve been. And accepting how much it will devastate those still attached to me. I’m not sure how to accept that. It doesn’t feel like an acceptable thing to do to people who love you.