on parallel universes

people talk about how liberating and empowering your 30s are, but if i’m being honest, when i look in the mirror, i often see a mausoleum of former possibilities staring back at me—unlived lives hanging in a closet like clothes that no longer fit, but i can’t bring myself to give away.

as children, we’re wide-eyed, wonder-drunk. we hold a kaleidoscope of dreams in our hands: different jobs, lovers, cities, versions of ourselves we haven’t yet met. we believe we can do anything, be anything, because, technically, we can. but the older we get, the more those paths not taken, those threads left unpulled, begin to thin. we seal our dreams into snow globes, each one a tiny universe suspended in false motion, visible but unreachable, guarded behind a pane of glass.

we soon discover the truth. that time is not infinite; energy, a dwindling resource. suddenly, possibility transmutes into a luxury good—sublime and coveted, but priced just out of reach. we realize the choices presented to us in life—to marry this person, to take that job in seattle instead of san francisco, to have children or not—ultimately prune away entire forests of potential selves.

a quote used to hang on my fridge, the one often misattributed to f. scott fitzgerald: “for what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be...” i still believe those words. i do. i believe in change, in second and third acts, in reinvention. but belief must exist in tandem with reality.

and reality lays bare the truth that we are bound. by age, circumstance, emotional and physical limitations. we simply can’t live out every one of our parallel lives. we can’t wander down every fork in the road, chase every love that titillates us, pursue every fleeting passion. we will never become all the people we once dreamed we might. because even if the multiverse exists, we can only ever occupy a single thread.

what i’m left with, then, is a kind of reckoning—not necessarily of regret, but of what’s been lost and what remains. that this is the life i’m living. the apartment with a leaking roof, the job where paid time off is an oxymoron, the friends who i don’t see often but whose birthdays i never forget. this is the self that came to be.

i guess what i’m trying to learn now is how to mourn the lives i’ll never live without resenting the one i currently inhabit. to find peace in this version of myself, in the people i’ve chosen, and the ones who’ve chosen me.

i was cleaning out my hard drive the other day, and i stumbled upon a law school application i’d completed but never sent in. for a moment, i saw myself there—arguing cases with practiced ease, redlining contracts in airport lounges, amassing billable hours in tailored suits. and in a flash, there grief was, brief but potent. not because life as a lawyer would have been any kinder, but because it remains forever perfect in its unrealized state, untarnished by the vexations of actual legal practice.

that’s the irony: those alternate universes, those parallel versions of me, probably suck too. maybe a little less, maybe a bit more. maybe in one, i wear my outdoor shoes in bed. maybe in another, i sell knives for a pyramid scheme, insisting it’s “a vertically integrated lifestyle empire for generational wealth” (fun fact: i did almost do this in my 20s). maybe in those lives, i’m the one looking over the fence, watching this present life unfold, wondering, what if?

i think it’s okay to be sad that we can’t do it all. to feel that we’ve spent years constructing a life only to find ourselves mourning all the ones we had to dismantle to build it. i think we’re so afraid to acknowledge what could have been because we believe we might start to resent what is. but maybe it’s possible for longing and gratitude to coexist. maybe real suffering lies in the insistence that we’re perfectly content, forcing ourselves to believe this is the best possible life instead of admitting it’s merely the one we chose.

in one of my favorite scenes from everything everywhere all at once, waymond wang confesses: “so even though you have broken my heart yet again, i wanted to say—in another life, i would have really liked just doing laundry and taxes with you.”

and look. here we are.

doing laundry.
paying taxes.
living a life that bears the marks of our choices.
not all lives. not every life.
but one.
and it’s beautiful.