If I had to live my life again, I’d make the same mistakes, only sooner.

The line treats “mistakes” not as moral failures to be erased but as essential ingredients of a fully lived life. By saying she would repeat them “only sooner,” the speaker rejects the usual narrative of repentance and instead embraces experience—pleasure, risk, and consequence—as a form of education and identity. The joke hinges on paradox: regret is acknowledged, yet immediately undercut by eagerness to accelerate the same errors. In Bankhead’s voice, it reads as defiant self-acceptance and a critique of prudence, suggesting that what society labels mistakes may be, for the individual, the very events that make life vivid and authentic.