I never really had a dream.
Not in the way people sometimes mean it when they talk about knowing, from childhood, what they were meant to do. I had interests, sometimes intense ones. I could throw myself into something for a while, learn everything I could about it, imagine what a life built around it might look like, and then at some point another thing would come along and pull me somewhere else.
For a long time I assumed that meant I had not figured myself out yet. Somewhere ahead was a more committed version of me who would finally pick a direction and stay there. I would become the person who had a plan, followed it, and eventually looked back at a life that made obvious sense.
That person had potential.
People like that word. Especially when you are young. You have so much potential. It is meant kindly, and most of the time it probably is. But if you hear it often enough, potential starts to feel less like something you possess and more like somebody following you around.
A better version of you.
One who has done more with the same material.
I met people who seemed to know what they wanted, and I envied that more than I envied whatever they were actually pursuing. They had wanted to be nurses or firefighters or teachers since they were teenagers. They had programs picked out, timelines, some sense of where one decision was supposed to lead next.
I wanted to want something that cleanly.
Instead, most of my life happened because something interested me and I followed it, or because something stopped making sense and I eventually left. Sometimes an opportunity appeared and I said yes before I had enough time to ruin it by thinking too much. A few of those choices became important parts of my life. Others disappeared almost completely.
From a distance, some of it probably looks planned.
It was not.
That is one of the strange things about having enough years behind you. A life begins to look inevitable once you know what happened. You can point backward and say this led to that, and then that led somewhere else, and eventually a path appears where there had mostly been decisions made one at a time.
I became a paramedic that way.
Teaching came later.
Writing, later still.
None of those things arrived because I had spent my childhood seeing them clearly in the distance. They just became parts of my life, and then large parts, and eventually things I could no longer imagine having completely missed.
There are other lives I did miss.
I think about those occasionally.
Not with enormous regret. More with curiosity. Things I might have been good at if I had stayed interested a little longer. Work I might have loved. Places I might have lived. People I might have known. Versions of myself built from decisions that went the other way.
The unfair thing is that those lives get to remain perfect.
The job I never took never became exhausting. The relationship that never happened never had a bad year. The book I have not written yet is still excellent. Every version of me who made a different choice gets to exist somewhere outside the inconvenience of having actually lived it.
Potential has that luxury.
Real life does not.
Real life has bills and tired mornings and things you lose interest in halfway through. It contains choices that felt right and turned out badly, and choices made almost accidentally that become difficult to imagine living without. It asks you to keep making decisions without showing you the version where you chose differently.
For years I think I expected to eventually feel finished with all of that. Not finished with life, obviously, but settled into myself in some permanent way. Certain enough that the old question about what I wanted to be would finally have an answer.
I am less convinced now that there is one.
There are things I care about deeply that I could not have predicted twenty years ago. There are things I became good at mostly because I stayed around long enough. There are people I love whom I would never have met if I had followed a cleaner, more deliberate version of my life.
There are also things I probably left too soon.
I can live with not knowing which was which.
Most days, anyway.
The ghost still shows up.
Usually when I am tired. Or dissatisfied. Or looking at somebody else’s life from exactly the right distance to misunderstand it.
You could have done more.
You could still do more.
Maybe.
That voice has never completely gone away.
I do not think I want it to. There are still things I want to try, and places I have not gone, and parts of myself I have probably not met yet. I am not trying to make peace with never becoming anything else.
I am just less interested in being haunted by all the people I could have been.
They never had to get up in the morning.
I did.
And somehow, through all the wandering and changing my mind and following things that made sense only for a while, there is a life behind me now.
Not the one I planned.
I cannot remember planning one.
Just this one.
Still unfinished.
