There usually arrives a point in each life - sometimes quietly, and sometimes rather forcefully - where one must build up the courage to ask a question many will spend decades avoiding:
“Is this really the life I chose… or just the life I have settled into?”
For years, many of us build identities the way architects build cities: deliberately, brick by brick, decision by decision: education, career, relationships, achievements. The scary bit is some don't even get to choose these paths for themselves. Either way, we utimately become associated with and defined by these paths: the engineer, the artist, the banker, the parent, the fixer, the doctor, whatever.
How often have you walked up to a stranger at a party and ended up asking what they do in a bid to get to know who they are?
And for a time, that feels enough.
Until one day, it doesn’t.
Sometimes the dissatisfaction sneaks up on us slowly, like hairline cracks in a wall. Sometimes it arrives abruptly, through loss, failure, burnout, success, or an unexpected stillness where momentum used to live.
Either way, it forces a reckoning.
A pause.
A redrawing of boundaries once believed permanent.
And then, what?
Look back and you'll see we've spent most of our lives defining ourselves by what we could build, solve, or contribute. It fueled ambition, forged resilience, opened doors. And so we boxed ourselves deeper into our professional identities. But identity, when too tightly held, becomes a cage of comfort disguised as relevance or purpose.
Recently, I’ve been wondering.
If the theory of the multiverse is true [bear with me if you have to google that] if versions of us exist across infinite realities, then why would we subject ourselves to living in just one reality, regardless how rewarding or stifling it is? If the average person is gifted in more than one area, isn't that sufficient proof that we’re biologically wired for more? If we only use a fraction of our brain as purported, what's the larger capacity there for?
Why have we come to believe we must choose one path, one definition of who we are, one script? Are we not cognitively more astute when we embrace a variation of abilities? So why do we so fear being more?
If we can even lightly accept the idea that somewhere out there, there are infinite versions of us, no matter how theoretically ridiculous, my suggestion is why don't we question whether those versions can coexist here, in this single lifetime, layered into one ever-evolving, unfinished human?
Maybe the multiverse is a fictional projection of the inherent fact that we are designed to be much more.
Maybe the multiverse isn’t cosmic.
Maybe it’s internal.
Maybe there are multiple realities of you and I, all existing beneath the surface, waiting for permission.
Not permission from the world.
Permission from us. You and I.
It's simple, it's seismic. But it's something that we all know deep down inside, if we are honest enough with each other
We are not required to become one thing.
We are mandated to become many.
You can pivot not because you failed, but because you grew.
You can abandon definitions that once made sense but no longer fit.
You can chase fulfilment instead of validation.
Curiosity instead of predictability.
Meaning instead of momentum.
Life isn't designed to be a single identity we carry to the finish line.
It’s designed to be a series of reinventions, rediscoveries, experiments, experiences and awakenings.
And maybe the real measure of adulthood isn’t consistency; it’s the courage to evolve.
It's not about proving anything.
It is about exploring everything you can, while you may.
It is about meeting and embracing the alternate versions of ourselves, but not as contradictions. As expansions.
The truth is, we get to decide what kind of life we want to live. And if we are brave enough, we get to live many lives within one.
So as I hit another birthday, I raise a glass to the next phase of life.
Not as a milestone...
But as a portal.