Writers 
Somewhere in another version of my life, there is a girl who has never heard of me, and I think she might be happier.
Maybe she chose a different school. Maybe she said yes to an opportunity I was too afraid to take. Maybe she kept a friend I lost, avoided a mistake I made, or discovered something about herself years before I did. Perhaps she is living a life that would make me wonder where I went wrong.
I think about her sometimes. Not because I believe in parallel universes, but because the human mind is an incredibly cruel place to live when you give it enough time. It can take a single decision and turn it into a thousand imaginary lives, each one showing you something you could have had but don't.
We rarely talk about the people we never became. We mourn the people we lose, the opportunities that disappear, and the things we once had. But what about the versions of ourselves that never got the chance to exist? The confident girl who spoke when I stayed silent. The ambitious person who tried when I hesitated. The version of me who walked away from something I spent years trying to hold together.
They never existed, and yet sometimes I miss them.
Perhaps this is one of the strangest things about being human: we can feel grief for a life we never lived. We can become jealous of imaginary people simply because they represent possibilities we can no longer explore. We can look at our present selves and wonder whether another decision would have produced someone we liked more.
But there is a problem with this kind of thinking.
We imagine these other versions of ourselves without giving them the problems we cannot see. The girl who chose another school might have met different difficulties. The person who took that opportunity might have regretted it. The version of me who never made that particular mistake might have made a worse one.
We give our imaginary selves perfect information about our regrets and then wonder why they seem to have better lives.
It is an unfair competition. I am comparing my actual life, with all its embarrassing decisions and uncertain outcomes, to fictional lives I have carefully edited to remove their disappointments.
Still, I wonder whether becoming someone means abandoning everyone else I could have been.
Every decision closes some doors. Every commitment requires us to leave certain possibilities behind. Even choosing something wonderful means choosing not to experience something else. We cannot live every life available to us, no matter how carefully we plan.
Maybe growing up is partly learning to accept that limitation.
I will never know who I would have been if I had made every different choice. I will never meet all the people I might have loved or discover all the places I might have called home. There are experiences that will remain strangers to me simply because my life took another direction.
And perhaps I need to stop treating that as a personal failure.
The girl I never became does not owe me an explanation. Neither does the life I never lived. They are possibilities, not promises. I was never guaranteed to become every person I could imagine.
But sometimes I wish I could meet one of those versions of myself. Not to ask her whether she is happier, because I suspect she would ask me the same question.
I would simply want to know whether she ever thinks about me.
Whether she wonders what would have happened if she had made the choices I made.
Whether, somewhere in the middle of an ordinary day, she pauses to imagine a girl who took a different road and wonders if that girl is doing all right.
Because maybe she is.
Maybe she is happy. Maybe she is struggling. Maybe she has her own collection of imaginary selves she envies, people she might have become if only she had done one thing differently.
Maybe she is looking at a life that is perfectly ordinary to her and wondering whether she chose the wrong one.
And maybe that is the strangest comfort of all.
Somewhere in my imagination, I have created an entire person to represent everything I fear I have missed. I have given her my unanswered questions and allowed her to become the embodiment of my regrets. I have imagined her happiness without considering that she might be doing exactly what I am doing.
Wondering about someone else.
I cannot return to the decisions that made me. I cannot rescue every possibility I abandoned or become every person I once thought I might be.
But I can stop using imaginary lives to punish the one I actually have.
There will always be another version of me I could have been. There will always be a road I didn't take, a conversation I didn't have, and an opportunity whose outcome I will never know.
I think I owe the person I am now the courtesy of letting her live without constantly comparing her to ghosts.
Even if those ghosts have my face.
After all, how can I expect to become someone I am proud of if I spend my entire life grieving everyone I never became?
