If I Could Turn Back Time by Rosibel

If I Could Turn Back Time by Rosibel - July 2025 Scholarship Essay

I used to live vicariously through Max from Square Enix’s 2015 episodic adventure game Life is Strange. I never had the game myself, I watched it through Youtube streamers like it was a movie. It felt like their experiences were also mine, as if I too could rewind time. Just like Max. I often imagined what it would be like to erase all of my mistakes by holding up my hand and concentrating, deleting the previous 50 seconds from public consciousness and granting myself an unlimited arsenal of second chances.
Today, I would tell my past self to pay closer attention to the message of the game. Even in a world where time travel exists, when it really mattered, the characters in the game were not granted second chances, those decisions were final. The decisions which truly shape us often are. You can’t fix everything and everyone, and regret will only cost you the present.
This heavy realization would have freed me from perfectionism in my youth. Life doesn’t reward perfection, it regards presence. Learning to center this ideology in my life has allowed me to show up even when I don’t always feel ready. I am now consciously correcting the perfectionist tendencies which prevent me from allowing things to just be. As I live my present, I now slowly shed the fears of my past self, and accept the flaws present in anything natural. I have learned to value presence and creation to truly seize the present. Maybe, if I had paid closer attention to the game I would’ve caught on sooner!
Life is Strange taught me that what will be, will be. While we cannot rewrite time, we can rewrite our relationship to it. We must not live in the past, we must cherish the present. Our decisions have unforeseeable consequences and we should act with kindness and lead with love. We must accept the past, as the passage of time, life and death are the only things we are promised. So, I would have advised her to begin to create and put herself out there, and stop searching for control in a world which was never meant to be predictable.