What Is One Thing I Would Change About Myself?

I have often asked the question with trembling lips,  
as if the act of asking might scatter  
the fragile architecture I have built around my being—  
a cathedral of memories, mistakes, half-lit confessions,  
and unfinished prayers that hum quietly under my skin.  

What would I change, if I were given the power  
to rewrite the gravity of my own heart?  
Not the body—no, that tired altar  
already knows too well its rhythm of bruises and breath.  
It is something subtler I wish to mend,  
something that hides behind my eyes like an echo,  
escaping whenever I try to name it.

There is a hesitance in me,  
a softness too cautious to melt completely,  
a hand that reaches only halfway across the table  
before withdrawing back into thought.  
I would change that—  
the half-inheritance of fear I was given  
by generations who confused gentleness with danger,  
and taught me that silence  
was nobler than risk.  

I want to speak without rehearsing  
the future of my words in advance.  
I want to love without calculating  
the pain required to sustain the feeling.  
Somewhere between restraint and surrender,  
my pulse writes small letters to the universe  
that never quite get mailed.

I remember the younger version of me,  
always standing at the edges of playgrounds,  
the child who watched other children  
as if joy were something  
you had to be invited into.  
I carried that waiting into adulthood—  
waiting for permission to exist more fully,  
to take up more space in my own reflection.  
Perhaps the one thing I would change  
is the architecture of waiting.

If I could rearrange this scaffolding of self,  
I would plant courage  
in the soil where hesitation grows like moss.  
I would teach my voice  
to break open the silence  
without apology.  
But change—  
real, luminous change—  
is not an act of violence against the self.  
It is a soft rebellion,  
a rethreading of the same fabric  
into something that breathes differently.

My mother often told me,  
be kind, even when it hurts.  
She forgot to mention  
that being kind to oneself  
is the hardest commandment of them all.  
I have forgiven others  
for everything they did not know.  
I have yet to kneel before the mirror  
and forgive myself  
for all the versions I silenced.

Sometimes, I dream of the self I could become:  
walking through the world as through a lover’s house,  
touching each object with reverence,  
each human with fearless tenderness.  
Someone whose laughter does not need to earn its place.  
Someone who can sit in disappointment  
without building a fortress of shame.

I want to change the way I love impermanence—  
the way I clutch at moments like a beggar with coins,  
instead of letting them dissolve through my fingers  
like sunlight through dust.  
If I could, I would learn  
the serenity of endings.  
To bow to the transient,  
to stop measuring happiness  
by how long it lasts.

There are nights I wake  
with my heart arguing against itself.  
One half wants to burn everything down.  
The other half kneels in gratitude  
for the ash that glows with remembrance.  
How do you change something that is both fire and prayer?  
How do you choose between the two voices  
when both speak in the same heartbeat?

If change were a river,  
I would not ask to divert its course.  
I would simply step in,  
feel its cold honesty against my legs,  
let it carry me where it will.  
But I want to learn how to float there  
without tensing for the next stone beneath my feet.  
To trust movement  
more than the illusion of control.

Sometimes I envy the moon.  
It wanes without shame,  
returns without explanation.  
It does not apologize for diminishing.  
It does not beg the night  
to admire its brightness.  
Perhaps what I really want to change  
is the way I equate diminuendo with loss—  
as if every quietening were a failure,  
as if stillness did not hold its own kind of light.

I have built my life like an essay  
whose thesis keeps changing.  
Each year, I revise myself into new margins,  
leaving traces of old arguments scratched out  
but never quite erased.  
Maybe that is the truth—  
that change is not a single act  
but an ongoing edit,  
an eternal draft of becoming.  
And yet, if I could fix one detail,  
it would be the fear  
of being a work perpetually in progress.

I would like to move through love  
without the rehearsed caution  
of those who have known hunger.  
I would like to kiss someone  
without checking who’s watching.  
I would like to pray  
without demanding answers in return.  
To feel awe without dissecting it,  
to be human  
without footnotes and disclaimers.

Sometimes, change is not about replacing an old self,  
but letting it rest.  
I would change my refusal  
to let go of every former version of me.  
Let the child remain in the photograph,  
let the skeptic retire,  
let the dreamer wake.  
There is no need to carry  
every ghost through the same doorway.

If you asked me again—  
What is the one thing I would change about myself?—  
perhaps I would whisper,  
nothing at all, except the way I ask the question.  
Maybe I would say,  
I wish to change the distance  
between acceptance and aspiration.  
To stand at that threshold  
and call it home.

At the end of all wanting,  
there is always the same silence:  
the body breathing,  
the heart negotiating with its own ache,  
the self holding a lantern too small  
for the size of its longing.  
If I could change one thing,  
perhaps I would make that lantern larger—  
or maybe I would finally learn  
to walk in the dark.

And still,  
beneath every confession hides another:  
I am both the sculptor and the stone.  
Whatever I change,  
it is still me who must live inside it—  
a human draft,  
eternally rewritten  
in the hand of mercy.  
Not better,  
not different,  
just truer.