When you’re a kid, the whole world around you seems infinite. You think you can touch it if you want to and it seems so simple to do so. Maybe you wanted to be a vet, or maybe you wanted to be president, or maybe you were like I was and wanted to be both. It was a childhood fantasy — a dream that always had the smallest of probabilities to happen. But nothing is impossible, right? Only improbable. Yet, no one really wants to take the risk of failure, so we move on to something more comfortable.
Everyone has these unlived lives, alternate universes where you took the chance and maybe it changed the very course of your life. Whether it’s doing that project you’ve always wanted to work on but never found the chance to, or going to that school you rejected, or even letting that person you’ve been crushing on for years get away. Everything we do in this life and the next creates a butterfly effect: one moment, one decision, one action, and suddenly you’re a different person with different dreams and maybe even a simpler life.
Dreams become futile when the reality of the world starts kicking in, and I don’t think anyone really lets go of that urgency to do something or be someone. The only thing that really changes is the anxiety of incompletion, feeling like you’ve disappointed the part of you that wants to be more. That disappointment only grows as you get older, until you find yourself wondering why exactly you didn’t just take the risk. Why couldn’t you be the person who could do it?
