What Happens to the Dreams You Never Followed?
I wonder if I'm the only one who has that one thing they had set their mind to do when they were younger and never got round to doing.
For me, it was law.
As a young girl, I dreamed of studying law and then becoming the type of barrister who was well known for fighting for justice. It wasn't a vague idea. In my head, I could see the woman I would become.
But it didn't happen.
That's what happens to most of the lives we don't live. They don't disappear — they wait at the edge of the one we're actually leading, ready to tell us something about who we still are, if we're willing to listen.
I was offered two places at university, but after failing my A-levels, I never made it. I have always put my failure down, at least partly, to my parents' divorce and the upheaval that came right in the middle of my A-levels.
Years later, I did eventually go to university. But I didn't study law. I studied Computer Science.
Why?
Because I thought it would be the more sensible thing to do.
I had three young children and, at that point in my life, sensible seemed more important than following a dream. I needed to make decisions based on the life I actually had, rather than the life I had imagined when I was seventeen.
I've never regretted studying Computer Science. It led me down a path I could never have predicted and eventually into a career in education. My life became something completely different from the one I had imagined as a girl.
And yet, every now and again, I think about that other life.
I wonder what would have happened if I had passed those A-levels, gone to university at eighteen, studied law, and become the barrister I imagined becoming. Would I have been happier? Would I have felt more fulfilled? Would I have become a completely different person?
Of course, I will never know.
And perhaps that is what makes these imagined lives so fascinating.
The lives that exist only in our imagination
Carl Jung wrote about the idea of the unlived life — the parts of ourselves and the possibilities within us that remain unexplored or unexpressed.
I've written about Jung's idea before, so I'm not going to revisit the concept in detail here.
What interests me more is what happens when we look back at our own lives and recognise one of those possibilities.
Perhaps it was a career you wanted but never pursued, or the artist, musician or writer you thought you might become. Perhaps you wanted to travel, but marriage, children, money or responsibility took you somewhere else. Perhaps there was a business you meant to start, a subject you meant to study, a person you meant to become. Or perhaps, like me, there is one particular moment in your life that you occasionally return to and wonder: what if things had gone differently?
Most of us have them.
They may not be enormous. Sometimes it is something quite ordinary that has stayed with us for decades.
But every so often, we open that imaginary door and look through it. And for a moment, we can see another version of ourselves standing on the other side.
The problem with the road not taken
There is something seductive about imagining the life we didn't live.
The alternative life has one significant advantage over the life we actually lived: we don't know what went wrong.
When I think about becoming a barrister, I don't imagine the long hours, difficult cases, tedious paperwork or the possibility that I might eventually have discovered that being a barrister wasn't what I thought it would be. I imagine the interesting parts: standing in court, fighting for justice, being successful and respected, becoming the version of myself I might have been.
In other words, I'm not really imagining a life. I'm imagining a possibility. And that distinction matters.
We can easily look at a road we didn't take and assume that it would have led somewhere better. But we don't know that. We have edited the story because we only have access to the beginning.
The life we actually lived contains everything: the achievements and the disappointments, the excitement and the boredom, the good decisions and the mistakes.
The life we didn't live contains none of those things. It remains perfect precisely because it never had the opportunity to become real.
What if it wasn't really about the thing?
I've thought about my law dream quite a lot over the years.
And the older I get, the more I wonder whether becoming a barrister was ever really the important part.
Perhaps what mattered was what being a barrister represented to me: justice, having a voice, standing up for people, being independent, being taken seriously, doing something that mattered.
At seventeen, I didn't have the experience to understand all of that. I simply had a dream of becoming a barrister. But perhaps our younger selves sometimes know something before we have the language to explain it.
The career isn't necessarily the dream, and neither is the qualification, or the place we wanted to live. Sometimes those things are simply the form our deeper desires took at a particular point in our lives. And that means we don't necessarily have to go back and recreate them.
We can ask a different question: what was underneath the dream? That is a much more interesting question.
We make choices with the life we have at the time
It's easy to look backwards with the benefit of hindsight and judge our younger selves.
I sometimes think about the decision to study Computer Science rather than law and wonder what I might have done differently if I'd known then what I know now.
But I didn't know then what I know now. I had three young children, and my priorities, my circumstances and who I was had all changed. And I made what seemed like a sensible decision with the information available to me.
That is something we often forget when we look back at our lives. We judge past decisions from the perspective of the present.
We know what happened next: which relationships ended, which opportunities disappeared, which careers became dead ends and which ones opened doors. Our younger selves knew none of that. They were simply making their way through the life in front of them.
Sometimes we made choices because we were afraid, because we were responsible for other people, because we didn't believe we could, because we didn't have the money, or because circumstances simply got in the way. And sometimes we made perfectly good choices that nevertheless meant other possibilities disappeared.
That's life. Every choice creates a future, but it also closes off other futures.
Do we have to regret the life we didn't live?
I don't think so. In fact, I think regret can sometimes obscure something more useful.
If I spend my time thinking I should have studied law, I turn my past into a mistake. But perhaps it wasn't a mistake. Perhaps it was simply one of the many turns my life took. And perhaps the more interesting question isn't what I should have done differently, but what that old dream can still tell me about myself.
There may be something in our abandoned dreams that is still alive. Not necessarily the original ambition, but the underlying value: the curiosity, the creativity, the desire for adventure, the need for independence, the wish to help people, the longing to make a difference. These things don't necessarily have an expiry date just because we didn't pursue them when we were twenty.
That doesn't mean we need to suddenly become the person we once imagined. It means we can recognise that the younger version of ourselves wasn't completely wrong about what mattered. She just didn't know yet how many different forms a life could take.
Perhaps the unlived life isn't asking to be lived
This is the part I've been thinking about most.
Perhaps the life we didn't live isn't necessarily a life waiting for us to go back and live it. Perhaps it has already done its job. It showed us something. It revealed a desire. It gave us a glimpse of a possibility. And then life took us somewhere else.
We don't have to turn every old dream into a project. Sometimes we can simply understand it. We can say that it mattered to us, wonder what might have happened, and feel glad we still remember that part of ourselves. And then continue living the life we actually have.
There is a certain freedom in that. Because otherwise we can spend our later years trying to compensate for everything we didn't do. We can turn life into a list of unfinished business: the degree we didn't take, the book we didn't write, the place we didn't move to, the career we didn't pursue, the relationship we didn't have, the person we didn't become.
But life isn't an examination paper where we have to complete every question. Some things simply remain unanswered.
And yet, sometimes the past points forward
There is one thing I don't want to lose in all of this.
Sometimes looking back really can show us something about where we want to go next. Not because we need to recreate the past, but because our old dreams can contain clues about what still matters.
Perhaps the person who always wanted to write should finally write. Perhaps the one who loved music should pick up the instrument again, the one who dreamed of travelling should stop waiting for the perfect opportunity, and the one who wanted to help others should find a way to do that now. Not because they are trying to become their twenty-year-old self again, but because some parts of us remain remarkably consistent, even as the rest of our lives change.
Perhaps that is what I find most interesting about my own abandoned law career. I'm not sitting here wishing I could go back to being seventeen. I'm not planning to become a barrister. But I can still recognise the girl who wanted to fight for justice. And perhaps I can ask what happened to that part of her.
Where does she show up in the person I became? Where could she show up now? Those questions are much more interesting to me than wondering whether I chose the wrong degree.
We only get to live one version
There is no way of knowing what would have happened if I had passed those A-levels.
Perhaps I would have become the barrister I imagined. Perhaps I would have hated it. Perhaps I would have changed careers at thirty. Perhaps I would have met different people, lived somewhere else and never had the experiences that eventually brought me here.
There are an infinite number of possible lives we could imagine. But we only get to live one. The one we actually lived.
And perhaps the point isn't to make peace with every road we didn't take. Some roads will always make us curious. Perhaps we can simply stop asking whether the other road would have been better. We don't know. Instead, we can ask what the road we didn't take tells us about ourselves: what did we value, what did we long for, what did we believe was possible, and what parts of that younger person are still with us? And perhaps, most importantly, is there anything from that old dream that still belongs in the life we are living now?
I don't know whether studying law was my unlived life. Maybe it was. Maybe it was simply one of the many lives that might have been.
But I do know that the seventeen-year-old girl who dreamed of fighting for justice is still part of my story. I don't need to become her. I don't need to go back and finish what she started. But perhaps I can listen to her.
And perhaps that is what we can all do with the lives we didn't live: not mourn them, not romanticise them, not try to recreate them. Just listen.
Because sometimes the life we wonder about has something to tell us about the life we are still living.
If any of this has you turning over a road you didn't take, my guide It's Not Too Late — A Practical Guide to Starting Over After 50 was written for exactly that moment. Read more here — you don't need the whole plan, just a next step.
