i wanted to be everything

waiting for the words that haven't been written yet.

I used to imagine everything I could be. I was fascinated with all the possibilities the future might bring. but now, I feel stuck with what I am. all the potential I believed I had, all the interests I thought I could pursue, all the different lives I wanted to live.

maybe I just wanted to live — properly, fully. I wanted to live like I meant it. I wanted to prove I wasn’t here by accident.

I used to think about the ways people lived their lives, and I would wonder: what did they want to be? and why are they not it?

I thought about my teachers. did they really want to be teachers? 
was our middle school art teacher truly meant for classrooms, or did he once imagine himself in galleries instead of school halls? 
I wondered about my doctor — would he rather be in a lab, working on something that is yet undiscovered? 
even the girl making my coffee — what was her real ambition? maybe she wanted to be an actress.

and then I started wondering about the people closest to me. did my mother ever imagine a different life? did she ever think about who she could have been if she had chosen differently?

I became less interested in what people were, and more interested in where it changed for them. at what point do people let go of their dreams and surrender to the force that is life? when do they stop trying to make things happen, and start accepting what isn’t happening?

where does it go wrong?

do they wake up one day and simply stop believing? or is it slower than that — years of trying, of failing, until they become convinced that they're on the wrong path? 

and the more I thought about it, the more I wondered how I could avoid that fate. I wanted to understand all the ways people fail, as if learning the pattern might help me escape it.

I was never satisfied with what I had. I always wanted more — wanted what I didn’t have. I didn’t like who I was, so I kept imagining all the ways I could be someone else. 

accepting the alternative would have been easier. and more devastating.

what if other people are actually content with their lives? what if life isn’t unfair, and I’m just the one who can’t accept it? what if people either get what they want, or learn to love what they have — and I’m the exception? maybe it's me who's always ungrateful.

is it possible to outrun what’s inevitable? can I really refuse reality?

maybe the first step is admitting that life isn’t on my side. that things won’t come easily, and that there’s a real chance what i want might never happen. we’re not guaranteed a happy ending, and life doesn’t care about narrative.

and when I feel most doubtful, I think about all the biographies I’ve read. I know success rarely comes quickly — and sometimes it comes too late.

like Franz Kafka.

he lived his life almost entirely unnoticed. he published metamorphosis, and no one really cared. it made no noise. he died at forty, unknown, with most of his work unpublished, believing it didn’t matter. he even wanted it all destroyed.

it was only after his death, after the world had changed enough to understand him, that his work was recognized. the world had to catch up to him. it took a war for that to happen.

and I know things has a frequent habit of not working out too.

I think about all the others — the ones we’ll never know. the names without faces, the writers whose words were never read.

how many people with real potential just went unnoticed?

maybe the person with the most potential never even got the chance to write.
maybe they spent their life somewhere in the country, working in an olive field, never making it into the city, never finding the space or the time or the belief that they could, that they should.
and the greatest story ever imagined stayed exactly that — imagined. 

unwritten and unknown. gone before it could come to life. 

maybe someone was meant to write the words that would save me.
maybe they already did — decades ago, under the dim light of a candle, writing something without knowing whether someone would ever understand it. 
and when they tried to share it, the door was shut in their face.

because someone, somewhere, read those words — the very words that might have changed everything for me — and didn’t recognize them for what they were.
they found them confusing. unclear. maybe even meaningless. they just weren't able to crack the code.

and so they crossed them out. rejected. unpublished.

so the revelation i've been waiting for is forever lost. 

as much as I’m afraid of life passing me by, I’m also afraid of missing life itself.

I haven’t yet read what I most need to read.

but maybe no one has written it. maybe no one ever will.

maybe it is me
who has to write the words that will save me.