The Lives I Won't Live

Somewhere between who I was and who I’m supposed to become.

Some days it feels like I’m standing in this endless hallway.

It’s not haunted, not eerie, just long. Long and still and echoey, like the kind of place you don’t know whether to run through or whisper in. The walls are lined with doors, stretching out so far in either direction that the hallway fades into a blur, like a dream I can’t fully remember.

There must be a thousand of them. Maybe more.

Each one is different. Some are painted in colors I’ve loved since childhood, soft sea-glass blue, warm clay red, sunflower yellow. Others are sleek and modern, polished like ambition. A few are cracked and crooked and look like they’d take effort just to open. Doors for the brave, maybe. Or the broken.

Some are familiar. I swear I’ve seen them before in dreams, or maybe in the corners of my imagination when I was younger and everything still felt possible.

And I want to open all of them.

That’s the hardest part.

I want to live every version of my life. I want to try every path, taste every future, wear every version of myself like a costume at a fitting.

But I can’t.

Because you can only walk through one door at a time.

And that’s where the fear lives. Not in the hallway. Not in the doors.

In the choosing.

There’s something agonizing about standing in front of so many possibilities and knowing that no matter how magical they might be, I have to pick one — just one — and the rest will go unlived.

Everyone talks about how beautiful it is to have choices, to have potential, to have freedom. And it is. But no one ever talks about the grief that comes with it. No one tells you that standing in front of a thousand doors can feel like standing at the edge of a cliff, the weight of every unlived life tugging at your back.

I want to be an artist. I want to spend my mornings with paint on my hands and my afternoons wandering through museums and galleries, breathing in color and chaos and quiet.

But I also want to write novels in a cabin in the woods, tea beside me, rain tapping on the window as I bring stories to life from the emptiness of a blank page.

And I want to travel. I want to live out of a suitcase, collect stamps in my passport, learn new languages, get lost in cities I can’t pronounce. I want to sit on a rooftop in Morocco, or Thailand, or Italy, eating food I don’t know the names of and watching the sunset over unfamiliar buildings.

And I want to build something. Maybe a business, maybe a brand, maybe a movement, something that helps people, something that outlives me. Something that makes people say, “She did something real.”

And I want to fall in love. Deeply. Fully. The kind of love that makes your bones ache and your soul feel seen. I want to grow roots with someone. Build a home. Become someone’s safe place.

And I want to be a mother. I want to hold a tiny version of myself and cry because the world suddenly feels softer. I want to be the kind of mom who makes her kids feel safe to be anything.

I want to live all of these lives. I want them all so badly that it physically hurts.

But the thing about time, the thing no one really tells you, is that it’s a thief with gentle hands. It doesn’t steal from you all at once. It just waits. And as you stand still, frozen in indecision, the hallway grows longer, the doors grow quieter. One by one, they lock behind you. Not out of cruelty. Just reality.

Not every door stays open forever.

Some days I think maybe the hallway itself is the trap. Like maybe life isn’t about finding the “right” door at all, but about the courage to open any door and step through it, even when your heart is still clinging to the ones you’re leaving behind.

But then that little voice creeps in, the one that says, “What if you mess it up? What if you waste your one chance on a door that leads to nowhere?”

And so I wait.

I scroll. I pace. I plan. I imagine. I compare. I cry. I stall.

I pretend that standing still is a kind of progress.

It isn’t.

It’s fear, dressed up as caution.

It’s perfectionism whispering, “If you can’t do everything, maybe don’t do anything at all.”

But still, I stand.

Sometimes, I press my ear to the wood and try to listen for the life behind each door. I hear laughter behind some. Music behind others. One door sounds like waves crashing. Another sounds like applause. One sounds like silence, but not the empty kind. The peaceful kind.

Sometimes I imagine myself in those lives, trying them on like clothes in a fitting room. I imagine who I’d become if I stepped into each one. Would I be happier? Braver? Softer? Stronger?

Would I still be me?

And that’s another fear, isn’t it? That I’ll walk through one of these doors and lose myself in the process. That I’ll wake up five years from now and wonder who I became and why. That I’ll trade in a hundred dreams for a life that’s fine — just fine — but never sets my soul on fire.

I think about that a lot.

Too much, probably.

People don’t get it. They think I’m indecisive or lazy or immature. They see a girl with her feet planted in a hallway full of promise and they think, Why doesn’t she just pick one and go?

But they don’t hear the noise in my head. They don’t carry the same pressure in their chest. They don’t know what it’s like to love everything and still feel like nothing’s calling loud enough.

I know life isn’t a straight line. I know doors can lead to more hallways, and those hallways have new doors, and maybe I’ll get to live many of these lives after all. But I also know that some doors don’t open twice. And some choices change everything.

And so I freeze.

But maybe…

Maybe one day soon I’ll get tired of listening.

Maybe the silence will get so loud it hurts.

Maybe I’ll stop looking for the “perfect” door and just reach for the one that feels warm. Or brave. Or soft. Or right enough.

Maybe I’ll learn that choosing doesn’t mean failure, it means motion.

And maybe I’ll learn to grieve the doors I didn’t choose without resenting the one I did.

Because living is a kind of loss, isn’t it?

You lose the lives you don’t live, the people you don’t become, the paths you never take.

But maybe you gain something too.

Maybe you gain depth in the version you do live.

Maybe you find meaning, not in the options, but in the walking.

Maybe this hallway was never meant to be a prison.

Maybe it’s a rite of passage.

And maybe I’m not stuck.

Maybe I’m just still becoming brave enough to turn the knob.