I Wish I Could Have Every Life I Want

I Wish I Could Have Every Life I Want

On wanting every possible life and learning that we only get to choose one

hasif 💌

Oct 08, 2026

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I wish I could have every life I want. I wish I could become a writer and a doctor and someone who disappears to another country for five years and someone who never leaves home. I wish I could fall in love with different people and know who I would have become with each of them. I wish I could take every career seriously for a few years, live in every city that has ever made me curious, wake up one morning in a life I chose and then come back to this one whenever I wanted. I know that sounds impossible and ridiculous. That is exactly what makes it so sad.

There are too many things I want from life for one person to contain all of them. I don’t mean this in the usual way of wanting success or wanting to accomplish everything before I die. I mean I want to experience the lives themselves. I want to know what it feels like to be the person who made a completely different decision. I want to know what would have happened if I had taken that other opportunity, gone to that other place, met that other person, said yes when I said no. There is something unbearable about knowing that every decision quietly kills off hundreds of other possibilities.

We don’t usually think of choices as losses. We talk about choosing as if something simply gets added to our lives. You choose a university, you get a degree. You choose a job, you get a career. You choose a person, you build a relationship. We talk about what we gain from the decision because that is easier to live with. We rarely talk about everything that disappears at the same time.

Choosing one city means never knowing what your life would have looked like in another. Choosing one person means there are entire versions of intimacy you will never experience. Choosing one career means there are skills you will never develop and rooms you will never sit in and people you will never meet. Even the smallest decision can change the shape of everything that comes after it. We only notice how much a choice mattered when we look backwards.

I think that is where the strange grief comes from. Sometimes we are mourning something that never actually happened. There is no funeral for the life you didn’t live. Nobody sends flowers because you didn’t become the person you once thought you would be. There is no particular day when you are supposed to accept that a certain future has disappeared. You just realise one day that you are too far into your current life to become that person anymore.

And that can hurt even when you are happy.

I think people misunderstand this part. Wondering about another life doesn’t automatically mean you hate the one you have. You can love where you are and still wonder where you could have gone. You can be grateful for your friends and still wonder who you would have met if you had moved away. You can love your work and still wonder what would have happened if you had chosen something completely different. Contentment doesn’t erase curiosity.

Sometimes I think we want happiness to be proof that we made the right decision. If I am happy here, then this must have been the right path. If I am unhappy, then I must have chosen wrong. Life is much messier than that. A good decision can still lead to difficult years. A bad decision can contain some of the happiest days of your life. There is no clean system where every choice reveals its value immediately.

And we never get to compare.

That might be the hardest part. If I could live two lives at once, I could actually know which one I preferred. I could spend five years becoming one person and five years becoming another and sit down at the end and decide. Instead, I have to choose without knowing what the alternative would have given me. I have to trust a feeling, a desire, a fear, a circumstance, or sometimes nothing more than a random moment when one door happened to open before another.

Then years pass, and we start wondering.

I think this is something we all understand in our own way, even when the choices themselves are completely different. One of my subscribers, Marisa Jorgensen, wrote about this feeling in a way that made me think about how complicated it is to choose a life when another one is still somewhere in your head.

Her story is about one of those decisions that can look very simple from the outside and feel completely different when you are the person who has to live with it. There is a lot in her essay about wanting one life while knowing another one could have existed, and I think she says something about that feeling that I couldn’t have written from my own experience.

MARISA’S FULL ESSAY:

As I lay down on the table, the doctor introduces me to the girl in the white. “This is our med student, is it okay if she’s in the room?”

I mutter “Of course” but my heart drops when I see her smile.

That should’ve been me.

Life would be so much easier.

I would get admitted to med school, pass my exams and I’d be a doctor. I would get the approval of my father and I would stay in Denmark with my family. But unfortunately, that is not what I want.

I want to go back to Australia and write.

My true path is the one with no signposts and lots of uncertainty. When I saw that med student, my heart dropped because in another life I would’ve chosen that path and maybe even been happy.

I would’ve stayed in Denmark and studied medicine and I would have made my father proud.

But I only have one life.

At my lowest point, I convinced myself that I was going to go back to school and become a doctor.

I was met with sighs of relief and approval.

“Finally she’s settling down and doing something worthwhile with her life.” That was a signal - that perhaps it was indeed time to grow up, settle down and get a proper education.

I devoured Grey’s Anatomy and convinced myself if I just became an attending surgeon, then I would be happy.

When I slowly started listening to my inner compass and realised medicine was not for me, I felt like a fraud.

This was yet another case of me saying I was going to do something and then failing to follow through.

I told myself I was flaky and inconsistent and that I was not to be trusted and I started putting on a disguise that I knew the people around me would approve of. But something happens when we live out of misalignment with who we are. It’s not always a big reckoning.

Sometimes it’s looking slightly grey in the mirror.

It’s realising we cannot remember the last time we belly laughed and if we did, we remember going home afterwards, turning off all the lights and asking ourselves exactly how we got here.

When I first returned to Denmark after having left my life in Australia, I was so homesick I could vomit.

No matter how much time I spent with my family, how much I tried to go out to socialise, I had a nagging feeling that I was so out of place I could have been an alien.

Depression followed and I was put on different medications to numb out these feelings; and it did work - for a bit.

I was high-functioning, enrolled myself in school and told everyone I had made peace with staying in Denmark and I was going to be a doctor.

Yet, I still had a nagging feeling of homesickness but I pushed it to the back of the line and told it to shut up.

After quitting alcohol, I made the decision to taper off my medications. And once you have nothing to drown out your intuition, it comes back tenfold. I realised I was playing a character in a play that I had never signed up for. My homesickness got stronger and my doubt about the path of medicine returned.

I started writing again and slowly my true path revealed itself.

Writing is what I have always loved.

It’s what I have done consistently despite being told it’s just a hobby. My spark returned when I welcomed the truth back into my life.

It is, however, not all rainbows and sunshine to come home to yourself. It involves a lot of grief.

You’re grieving the life you could have lived.

You’re grieving the understanding and approval from the people around you and you’re choosing to lean into fear with no guarantee that it will work out. Both are hard paths and only you can know which hard is worth it.

Being brave enough to follow your own path in life means grieving the person you could have been.

I kept thinking about her essay after reading it, especially the fact that some decisions don’t give us a clear answer. We make them, live with them and eventually become someone shaped by them, while the other possibility remains somewhere in the background. It doesn’t need to be better for us to wonder about it. It doesn’t even need to be something we would choose now.

Sometimes it is enough that it could have been ours.

And how are we supposed to grieve something that could have been good?

I think about that more than I probably should. There are choices where I don’t want to believe I made a mistake because I don’t think I did. I made the best decision I could with the person I was at the time. Still, there are moments when I wonder about the other option. I wonder who I would have become. I wonder if I would have been happier, or simply different. I wonder what parts of myself would have appeared in that life that never had the chance to appear here.

That last question gets me.

Because perhaps we don’t only mourn the experiences we missed. We mourn the people those experiences might have turned us into. Every life brings out a different version of us. Put me in another city and I might become more independent. Give me another career and I might become more confident. Let me meet different people and there might be parts of my personality that I have never had a reason to discover.

There are people inside us who will never get the chance to exist.

I don’t think we talk about that enough!!!!

We spend so much time asking what we want to achieve that we forget to ask who we want to become. Those are different questions. A career can give you money without giving you the person you hoped it would make you. A relationship can give you love while taking you away from parts of yourself. Sometimes the life that looks perfect from a distance would have made you into someone you wouldn’t recognise.

That is why I don’t completely trust the fantasy of the other life either.

When we imagine what could have happened, we tend to remove all the things that would have made that life difficult. We imagine the person we would have become at their best. We imagine the apartment, the friendships, the career, the relationship, the freedom. We don’t imagine them sitting alone on a Wednesday night wondering if they made the wrong decision too.

There is probably another version of me somewhere in my imagination doing the same thing.

He probably thinks my life looks better.

That is the ridiculous part. We could spend years envying people we don’t exist as, while somewhere inside another imagined life, that person might be envying us. Neither of us would ever know. We would just keep looking at the life we don’t have and giving it all the things we wish ours contained.

Still, I don’t want to dismiss the feeling. I don’t want to tell myself that wondering is pointless or that I should simply be grateful. Gratitude can be true while longing is also true. I can appreciate my life and still mourn the ones I will never get to experience.

Perhaps that is what growing up actually asks of us. We don’t just have to decide what we want. We have to accept that wanting one thing means leaving other things behind. Some of those losses will feel completely insignificant. Others will return years later and make us wonder.

I don’t think we need to turn those thoughts into regret.

Some lives can remain unanswered.

I can wonder what would have happened without deciding that I should have done something differently. I can miss a person I never became without believing that person was better. I can look at another life and admit that it looks beautiful without needing to abandon this one.

I still wish I could have every life I want, though.

I wish I could try everything without having to sacrifice anything. I wish I could know what every choice would have made of me. I wish I could walk into every possible future for a while and come back carrying a little piece of each one.

But I can’t.

I only get to find out what happens after the choices I actually make.

Maybe that is why those other lives feel so precious. They never get the chance to disappoint me. They remain untouched by bad days, failed relationships, boring jobs, loneliness, mistakes and all the ordinary things that make a real life real. They exist exactly as I imagine them.

And perhaps I can let them exist there.

I don’t have to choose between loving the life I have and wondering about the lives I don’t. I can carry both. I can be curious about the person I might have been while continuing to become the person I am.

There will always be another life I could have lived.

I just have to remember that this one is the only one I get to know.

About the Co-Author:

Marisa Jorgensen is a Danish poet and founder of a Substack publication where she writes about courage, self-examination, sobriety, her love for all things wild and following your heart when everyone tells you not to.

Born in Copenhagen, Marisa spent seven years building a life in regional Australia before grief, addiction and a complete personal collapse brought her back to Denmark. She got sober and began the slow work of reclaiming the parts of herself she had abandoned.

She is currently working in mental health in Copenhagen, training for a marathon, publishing personal essays and poems and planning her return to Australia - where she intends to buy a farm on a dirt road with a lot of German Shepherds and write books from the front porch.

Her debut poetry collection

The Anatomy of a Storm

is available on Amazon.

Co-author Substack ID:

Marisa Jorgensen

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