The paths we didn't take

A few weeks ago, I was reconnecting with a former colleague from my higher education days, and we started talking about our current work. At one point, she paused and said, “I love the path you’ve taken, but if you’d asked me ten years ago, I would have said you’d definitely end up a dean somewhere.”

Honestly, there was a time I thought so, too.

For years, that path felt not only plausible, but likely. I loved universities: the intellectual intensity, the sense of mission, the complicated human systems. I was drawn to institutional leadership and to the challenge of helping organizations navigate moments of conflict, ambiguity, and change. I understood the culture of academia intuitively and, perhaps more importantly, I knew how to function effectively within it. There was a period of my life when I could imagine, quite clearly, the version of myself who stayed. The version who climbed steadily upward through administration.

Instead, my life unfolded differently. I left higher education. I built a coaching and consulting practice. I write. I spend much of my time now in conversations that are more psychologically exploratory and relationally intimate than the work I once imagined myself doing.

Importantly, I love the life I have built. That is what made her comment feel so psychologically interesting to me. It did not evoke regret exactly. Rather, it prompted reflection on all the paths I did not take and all the selves I did not become.

I have been thinking about that conversation ever since because I suspect many of us carry some version of this experience quietly within us. At a certain point in adulthood, especially for people who have built meaningful careers and substantial lives, there is often a dawning awareness that every committed life necessarily involves loss. Not only circumstantial loss, but identity loss. By becoming one self, we inevitably relinquish others.

The narrowing of identity

When we are young, identity exists in a more expansive state. Multiple futures remain psychologically available to us at once. We can imagine becoming radically different kinds of people because, in some meaningful sense, we still can. The future has not yet narrowed around our commitments, responsibilities, relationships, or expertise.

Developmental psychologists have long written about the importance of identity exploration during adolescence and young adulthood. Erik Erikson conceptualized identity formation as one of the central developmental tasks of early life, while James Marcia later expanded upon this work by examining the process through which people commit to particular identities over time. What strikes me now, however, is that adulthood receives far less attention as a process of identity foreclosure—not in the pathological sense, but in the inevitable developmental sense. Mature adulthood requires commitment. Commitment, by definition, closes certain doors.

We choose partners, careers, cities, institutions, communities, and obligations. We develop expertise in some domains while allowing others to atrophy. We become increasingly recognizable to others and, over time, increasingly recognizable to ourselves. The diffuse possibilities of early adulthood gradually consolidate into something more stable and coherent.

This process is not inherently tragic. In many ways, it is the very thing that allows depth, intimacy, mastery, and meaning to emerge. A life cannot mature without consolidation. Yet I think many high-achieving adults are caught off guard by the emotional complexity of this developmental shift because our culture tends to frame success almost exclusively in terms of acquisition: the career built, the family created, the expertise gained, the opportunities secured.

Far less attention is paid to what success requires us to relinquish.

The competent self

I see this often in my coaching work, particularly among highly capable women in midlife. These are women who have built objectively meaningful lives. They are accomplished, respected, emotionally intelligent, and deeply competent. Many occupy positions of substantial responsibility within organizations or families. Most are not seeking escape from their lives. In fact, many feel profound gratitude for them.

And yet, beneath that gratitude, there is often another emotional current that can be difficult to name.

Sometimes it emerges unexpectedly. A client mentions rediscovering an old creative project and becomes emotional in a way she did not anticipate. Another describes attending a concert, hearing live music, and realizing she could not remember the last time she felt fully connected to herself outside the context of productivity or responsibility. Someone else reflects, almost casually, that she once imagined living abroad or pursuing a different intellectual life, and suddenly finds herself lingering on that thought far longer than expected.

These moments are rarely expressions of dramatic regret. More often, they reflect an encounter with unlived aspects of self.

The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips wrote that “the unlived life is not a later version of our life; it is a continuing present.” I have always found that observation psychologically astute. The selves we do not become do not disappear cleanly. They remain psychologically active in subtle ways, surfacing through longing, curiosity, envy, grief, fantasy, or nostalgia. Midlife often sharpens awareness of this reality because external striving begins to stabilize enough for people to notice what has been submerged beneath years of functioning.

What competence crowds out

I think this experience is particularly pronounced among adults whose identities have become highly organized around competence. Competence is enormously adaptive. Institutions reward it, families rely upon it, children require it, entire careers are built upon it. Over time, however, many high-achieving adults become so practiced at functioning that they lose contact with dimensions of selfhood that are less externally rewarded: spontaneity, creativity, solitude, sensuality, playfulness, curiosity without utility.

This is not because such capacities disappear entirely. Rather, they cease being reinforced.

Many high-achieving adults are not inauthentic in any simple sense. Quite the opposite. Often they are deeply sincere people who have become highly skilled at meeting the demands of complex systems. But there can come a point when the adaptive self becomes overdeveloped relative to the rest of the personality. The organized self, the productive self, the caregiving self, the leadership self become so reinforced that other dimensions of identity recede into the background.

The developmental task of midlife

Midlife often disrupts this equilibrium. Careers stabilize. Children grow older. External urgency shifts. And in the relative quiet that follows, people sometimes encounter an unsettling realization: achievement did not exempt them from being human. They still possess longing, ambivalence, contradiction, grief, and desire. They still wonder who they might have become under different circumstances. They still feel drawn toward aspects of self that have remained underdeveloped or neglected.

Importantly, I do not think the healthiest response to this realization is necessarily reinvention. Contemporary culture romanticizes dramatic transformation in ways I find psychologically simplistic. Most adults do not need to abandon their lives in order to reconnect with themselves. More often, the developmental task is subtler and more demanding: to become less psychologically rigid inside the life one has already built.

This may involve reclaiming neglected forms of creativity or pleasure. It may involve tolerating uncertainty after years of over-identification with expertise. It may require loosening identities that once provided safety, status, or belonging. In some cases, it simply means acknowledging the emotional truth that every meaningful life contains unrealized possibilities alongside fulfilled ones.

Holding two truths at once

I increasingly think maturity depends upon the capacity to hold both realities simultaneously. Gratitude for the life one has built and grief for the selves one did not become are not mutually exclusive emotional states. In fact, the ability to tolerate this complexity may represent a form of psychological development in its own right.

When I think now about the paths I did not take, I do not feel consumed by regret. Mostly, I feel curiosity and tenderness toward earlier versions of myself and respect for the reality that every meaningful commitment narrows as much as it deepens. There is no adult life that preserves infinite possibility. The task is not to mourn that fact endlessly, but neither is it to deny the emotional reality of what is relinquished along the way.

Perhaps part of becoming fully adult is recognizing that even beautiful lives contain loss and that success, however meaningful, cannot protect us from the fundamental human experience of wondering who else we might have been.

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