sylvia plath was right but i'm writing my ending differently

do i really need to be everything in life?

"It is not possible for me to be everything I want to be, to live all the lives I want to live. It is not possible to develop all the talents I want. So what is the reason why I want to? I want to experience every color, shade and variety of every possible mental and physical experience in my life." —Sylvia Plath.

I built such a vast universe in my head that there wasn’t a profession I hadn’t tried, a life I hadn’t lived. But when I looked in the mirror, the person staring back at me wasn’t a fairytale hero — it was a Dodo bird, ready to vanish. I had wandered so far into the universe inside my mind that when I finally faced myself, I was afraid. Because the person I saw wasn’t the version I had imagined: talented at everything, successful, admired.

Out of all the things I could have been — I chose to be nothing.

When I first read Sylvia Plath’s words, I found myself asking: “But why do I want to be so many things?” It didn’t take long to figure it out. When I stripped away the fantasies and confronted reality, I was faced with nothing but an ocean of regrets. No — not because of the regrets themselves, but because I had never stepped into that ocean. I had caused a flood by trying to discard my regrets like rags, rather than revising them, repairing them, or simply accepting them as part of my life.

Why was I so afraid to face them? I couldn’t even sit on the pier and dip my feet into the water, because I believed my regrets didn’t just impact me — they might drown the people I loved too. But looking back, that fear became my greatest regret: I had lived my whole life for others.

For instance, when I didn’t get into a good university, the first person to be disappointed was my mother. I regretted being the cause of the wrinkles on her face. She said, “It’s okay,” but the way her face tensed for a brief moment was etched into my memory. She had made the same face when I was six. And again at thirteen. That was just another regret added to the collection. Another liter of water poured into the ocean. But I never talked to her about it — as if a single liter didn’t matter.

Still, the heaviest file in my cabinet of regrets wasn’t labeled my mother’s — it was my father’s. “I wish I had told my father that I loved him. I wish I had told him he was my best friend. I wish I had told him that my happiest memories were with him. I wish I had made more. I wish I had listened more. I wish I could have saved him...” The list went on, each sentence beginning with “I wish,” and there’s no way to rewrite those words — because the person I wish I had said them to is no longer alive. There was always going to be at least a small pool that would be with me for the rest of my life.

But is that really a reason to keep holding myself back? I was terrified of drowning — but don’t we tell people learning to swim that the water will carry them? I was the one reheating my regrets and feeding them back to myself as excuses. Wasn’t I just creating more regrets by burying my own potential? Could I ever be truly happy without any regrets?

Matt Haig wrote in The Midnight Library: “But in no life can we be in pure happiness forever. To think that there can be such a life only serves to magnify our unhappiness in the life we are living.” That was true for me. I was always thinking more about what I wasn’t than what I could be. I treated my past like it was my future, convinced that what I had left was nothing.

So I decided to go back — not in time, but in memory — to see myself from the outside, to trace who I might have been if things had gone differently.

At four years old, I said I wanted to be my brother’s nurse. He had declared he would be a doctor — pretty ambitious for a six-year-old. And considering he is a doctor now, maybe I really was the unstable one. But I didn’t actually want to be a nurse — I just wanted to be close to him. At nine or ten, I said I wanted to be a pharmacist. I don’t know why. Probably for him again. Even my childhood dreams weren’t really mine.

As time passed, the feeling that nothing belonged to me grew stronger. If life had meaning, it certainly didn’t feel like it belonged to me. I was only thirteen, but I felt like an extra in the background of the world — just there to fill space. That was when the chain of regrets began. That age became a black hole in me, pulling everything else toward it.

The first time I truly wanted something for myself, I was fifteen. I wanted to become a prosecutor. Not becoming one ranks in my top three regrets. “I wish I had tried harder. I wish I hadn’t given up. I wish I had been stronger.” Maybe I lacked ambition. Maybe if I had been more like my brother, I would’ve succeeded.

“I wish I were like my brother.”
But I wasn’t. And that’s okay. I was — and am — normal. Like 8 billion other people, just trying to make sense of the path I’m on. Some roads are bumpy, some are paved, but that doesn’t mean those walking on smooth asphalt don’t carry their own weights. Their own oceans. Their own regrets.

Even if I hadn’t made the regrets I live with now, others would have taken their place. Because what I view as my deepest failures might be someone else’s greatest hopes. The finish line I dream of might be another person’s dead end. We all carry regrets — and that might be the most human thing about us. So I don’t need to apologize to anyone for mine — because my regrets probably don’t even exist in their version of the story.

I no longer want to stand on the pier, staring at the horizon, I want to swim toward it.

I want my regrets to accompany me — not as weights, but as fish in the ocean I once raised to punish myself.

I don’t need to build a dam to get rid of them. I don’t need to sit alone, watching the waves. This ocean is mine — and whether I drown in it, float, or dance in the currents, at least I’ll finally be moving.

Instead of running away, I need to adapt to this life and relearn how to walk — like a baby taking its first steps. It may be slow. It may be hard. But I will reach the horizon, even if I stumble along the way.

And even if I fail — it will be my regret.