Somewhere, there are versions of you that will never exist.
The version that moved cities without hesitation, the one who said yes when it mattered, the one who chose differently, and became someone else entirely. For a long time, we believed in all of them, carrying them with us like quiet, unfinished possibilities.Â
In the early stages of our lives, identity feels expansive, as though you can be the ambitious one, the creative one, the safe one, and the reckless one all at once. There is comfort in that openness, in the idea that nothing is fixed yet, that you are still becoming, still unfolding, still allowed to be everything at the same time. But slowly, almost without noticing, life begins to narrow.
Not all at once or in some dramatic, irreversible way, but in smaller, quieter moments. It changes through decisions that seem insignificant at first, like the subject you choose, the opportunity you turn down, the risk you don’t take, or the path you follow because it feels right, or simply available.Â
With every choice you make, something else quietly falls away. There is a quiet kind of grief that comes with that realization. It’s not loud or overwhelming, but steady and persistent, growing alongside you. It is the understanding that there are entire lives you will never live, not because you weren’t capable of them, but because you chose something else, because time keeps moving forward. After all, you cannot be in two places at once, and becoming one version of yourself inevitably means letting go of others.
We don’t talk about this grief enough, about the “what ifs” we carry, the alternate timelines that linger in the back of our minds, or the versions of us that existed only briefly until a single decision made them impossible.
But at the same time, maybe this isn’t something to regret. Maybe those lives were never meant to be lived all at once, and maybe the beauty of being humans doesn’t lie in our ability to be everything, but in our willingness to choose something and stay with it. Every version you didn’t become made space for the one you’re building now, a version that isn’t hypothetical, but present and real, shaped by the choices you’ve already made, by the paths you stayed on, and by the ones you chose to walk away from.
You can miss the lives you didn’t live and still love the one you’re in, just as you can wonder what might have happened if things were different without actually wishing that they were. There is loss in choosing, but there is also direction and a kind of quiet certainty that only comes from committing to something real.
Somewhere, there are versions of you that will never exist.
And maybe that’s okay, because the person you dream of becoming is no longer a possibility, but a reality with every choice you make.