In a world of endless options it’s easy to think the life we chose was one of many possible outcomes. And it was, I suppose, if we’d made different choices at different times. It’s easy to fantasise about what we could have done differently. What might have shaken out another way if we’d said no instead of yes, yes instead of no, if we’d stood a little more to the right or been a little less restless. God, do I wonder how orderly and clean and sensible my life would have been if I’d just been a little less restless.
It all could have been different. But it wasn’t. And it isn’t.
I’ve been reading lately that 32 is a big brain shift, the true ending of adolescence. The next shift doesn’t happen until 66, they say, so 32 is the settling of the adolescent mind for the long stretch of adulthood. Since last November, when I turned 32, I’ve felt like the cogs in my brain have been rewiring. I couldn’t blame it on postpartum anymore, five years out, and I couldn’t really blame anything external either. Beyond the usual gut punches and sky-is-falling-wait-never-mind days, everything was fine enough. But I was seeing the world, and myself, completely differently and didn’t know how to name it.
One thing is I’m realizing is how many false lives I’ve been holding onto, dragging behind me.
I’ve always carried the shadow of “what if I’d stayed in Australia,” as though that had ever really been possible. As if I hadn’t wanted to crawl out of my skin there. As if I wouldn’t have ended up in a village with no phone on the other side of the world at some point anyway. As if I wasn’t born with my head on fire and the need to go get lost. It could never have been any other way.
“Nostalgia is sexy but not healthy.” And I feel ready to let go of this idea that there’s another life running alongside mine that I could step back into. The Australia I knew is long gone. Apart from family and a tiny handful of friends, the people are gone. If I moved back I’d be starting completely anew, and that’s how it should be.
They say there are all these lives we wave at like sister ships on the shore. But now at 32 I see they were never mine.
There was El Salvador, then Guatemala. There are eight years of crooked Spanish. There is my wild-haired five-year-old and the man I had to cross the planet to find. There are the people in my life now, the ones who message me and send me their podcast-length voice notes. Not the people I lost when I missed too many life events to keep stitching the friendships together.
Who is in my life now — that is who is here. And I want to step more fully into these relationships and clear the space of all the ghosts who left. It is time. What is here is what is here and it deserves my full attention.
Of course and obviously, I am not saying you can’t change your life moving forward. You can speak to yourself differently, make better or different choices, move cities, move countries, surround yourself with different people, you can paint a completely different picture. But you can’t rewrite the past, and I don’t think it’s healthy to spend too much time dabbling in what could have been. It couldn’t have been, because it didn’t.
I’m ready to drop the nostalgia and stop pretending it was ever meant to be anything other than this. I’m not saying it won’t change but I think this idea of parralell lives, while it soothed me in my twenties, now does the opposite. The sister lives don’t exist. They never did.
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