“When I was 30, if I thought about 50, I thought, that is an awful long way away… And… and then I blinked, and I’m 50… I wish I could say that I’ve done more with my 50 years… But… I never made it to law school. And I never got to see Paris… I put things off… And I don’t want to do that anymore.”
I paused. I heard it mid-doomscroll. You know the kind, where your fingers move automatically while your brain drifts somewhere else entirely, watching TikTok edits stitched together from television shows I have never even properly watched, carrying emotions that somehow still feel more real than my own life.
“I never got to see Paris…”
I had never been to Paris either. In fact, there are a lot of places I have never been to. For most of my life, I have experienced the world vicariously through fictional characters on a screen. Paris was never really about Paris. It was about the life she thought she would one day become brave enough to live.
I think I have spent most of my life believing in “someday” followed by whispered promises of “I will do it tomorrow.”
I would lose the weight.
Become social.
Leave the house more.
Feel comfortable being perceived by other people.
Start living instead of rehearsing for a life that never arrived.
But tomorrow is a dangerous place to live.
I used to think tomorrow was a fresh start, untouched by the failures of today. Now I think tomorrow does not really exist at all. It is just a continuous extension of today-the life you are already living.
And that realisation frightened me.
Because so many of my tomorrows never came. They existed only as emotional support fantasies, little promises I fed myself to survive the present without ever changing it.
I have lost summers waiting to become thinner before allowing myself to exist properly. Lost years convincing myself my life would begin once I became less anxious, less awkward, less afraid. As though living was something you had to earn first.
Meanwhile, life kept moving in ordinary, irreversible ways.
As a child, I found strange comfort in the idea of a time machine. Not because I dreamed of the future, but because I could not bear the permanence of the present. The thought that I could rewind my mistakes made life feel less final. Mistakes only felt survivable if I imagined they were temporary.
Maybe that is why I became so comfortable postponing things. Deep down, I never fully believed time was actually moving.
Days became months became birthdays became years.
And I remained almost perfectly still.
There is a specific loneliness in realising you have mistaken dreaming for living. In realising your inner world became so rich because your real one became so small.
I do not think I wanted to die. I think I just stopped expecting much from being alive.
There is a difference.
My life became a life dreamt rather than a life lived. The days blurred together so seamlessly that disappearing inside them began to feel natural.
That scared me more than sadness ever has.
Because I suddenly understood how a life can vanish quietly. Not through catastrophe, but through postponement. Through hesitation. Through waiting for a version of yourself that never quite arrives.
I keep thinking about that quote now. About blinking and becoming fifty. About all the tiny ways people abandon themselves while fully intending to return later.
I do not want to keep living as though my real life is permanently about to begin.
I think I want this day, however imperfectly.
Not tomorrow.
Today.
