opinion
we spend a surprising amount of time wishing that parts of our lives had been different: a different childhood, more money, another country, a different school or a different set of opportunities.
Sometimes the wish is obvious. We wonder how our lives might have unfolded had we started somewhere else. Other times, it is more subtle. We see somebody else’s life and briefly imagine ourselves living it - a different home, a different family, a different story.
And the fantasy feels simple: their life, myself, simply combined. But hidden within this wish is an assumption we rarely stop to examine.
Whenever we imagine a different life, we usually imagine remaining ourselves within it. We assume our values, ambitions, desires and way of seeing the world would somehow survive the exchange intact, as though the self exists independently of the life that produced it. But why do we assume that? Why do we assume we can change the beginning without changing the person shaped by it?
This is where the wish becomes less straightforward. Because if the beginning changed, the experiences would change. And if the experiences changed, perhaps the person shaped by them would change too. What if a different life would not simply have changed what we had, but who we became?
The reason this idea feels difficult to accept is that most of us think of ourselves and our lives as fundamentally separate. There is, who I am. And then, there is everything that has happened to me. The distinction feels obvious. We experience ourselves as stable individuals moving through the world while circumstances come and go around us. Childhood, family, culture, education and relationships feel like chapters in a story.
The self feels like the author. Life feels like the material. But where exactly does the self end and circumstance begin? Take something as ordinary as the way you see the world - your values, your ambitions, your sense of what matters.
These things feel deeply personal. They seem like expressions of who you are. But where did they come from? How much of your worldview was shaped by the home in which you grew up, the people who surrounded you or the experiences that rewarded, disappointed, challenged or transformed you? The more closely we examine ourselves, the harder it becomes to locate the boundary. The self may not be as separate from the life that produced it as we imagine.
Perhaps one reason this boundary is so difficult to locate is that much of what we call personality has a history. Very little of who we are emerges in isolation. Consider how often we admire a trait without considering the conditions that produced it. Someone values independence. But independence often comes from somewhere. Perhaps they learned early that they could rely only on themselves. Perhaps they moved through life without the certainty that someone would always be there to catch them when they fell.
Someone is deeply empathetic. Perhaps that empathy emerged from knowing what it felt like to be misunderstood. Someone places great importance on family. Perhaps they grew up surrounded by a kind of closeness they never forgot.
We want the fruit without the tree. The same is true of experiences we would never have chosen for ourselves. Heartbreak changes the way we approach love. Disappointment changes the way we think about ambition. Loneliness changes the way we relate to ourselves. These experiences do not simply happen to a person. They become part of the person they happened to. And once we begin to see that, identity starts to look less like something we possess and more like something that has been formed.
There is another implication that follows from this and it may be the most humbling one. Most of us like to believe that we authored ourselves. We prefer to think of identity as something we consciously built through our own decisions, values and choices. Yet, some of the most powerful influences on who we became arrived long before we ever exercised conscious choice. We inherited a language. A culture. A family. A set of assumptions about what was normal, desirable, possible and important. None of these were chosen and yet all of them played a role in shaping the person we would become.
There is something humbling about realising that many of the deepest parts of ourselves were formed before we were even aware they were being formed. This does not mean we lack agency. It means that agency is never exercised in a vacuum. Every decision we make is made by a person who already carries the influence of a particular upbringing, culture, history and environment.
The deeper realisation is that our circumstances helped create the person who would later believe they were acting independently of them.
This is not an argument for gratitude. Nor is it an argument that everything happened for a reason. Many circumstances are painful. Many are unfair. Many are things we would never choose for ourselves. The point is not that every part of the past was good. The point is that every part of the past participated in the formation of the person who exists now.
The childhood home is no longer just a building. It is the place where someone first learned what family felt like. The route to school is no longer just a route. It helped shape a person’s understanding of familiarity. The neighbourhood. The friendships. The crushes. The heartbreaks. The people who stayed. The people who left.
These are often treated as details surrounding a life. But they may be more than that. Perhaps they are part of what we mean when we say, “I.”
The life we lived is not separate from who we are. It is woven into who we are. And perhaps that is why the wish for a different beginning becomes so complicated. What is being exchanged is not merely a set of circumstances. It is the person those circumstances created. And that person is you.
Neshmeeya Abbas is an author based in London. She can be reached at [email protected]
