The Version of You That Doesn’t Come With You

Jenna was standing in a department store when two women told her she needed to hurry. One was young, maybe twenty-five, with red hair and the particular impatience of someone who had already been waiting too long. The other was older, with brown skin and long black hair. She seemed calmer. More experienced somehow.

They were going somewhere.

Jenna was apparently going with them. The problem was that nobody had told her where.

She wandered through racks of clothing, increasingly aware that the women were waiting. What exactly did you wear to an unknown destination? She picked up a pair of jeans. When she turned around, the women were gone. So was the department store.

There were no walls anymore. No floor. No ceiling. There was no light, but strangely, it wasn't dark. Nothing cast a shadow. Jenna was moving at an impossible speed through something enormous—perhaps the universe itself.

She wasn't frightened. She felt incredibly small and incredibly free. Then something began speaking to her, although there was no voice. It offered her something extraordinary.

The answers. Not answers to the small questions she'd spent her life asking, but the great ones. Why we're here. What happens when we die. Whether there is something beyond us. Every mystery human beings had spent time immemorial trying to understand.

And then came the greatest offer of all. She could become immortal. No pain, no suffering, no wanting, nothing to dislike. Pure peace and serenity. It was an honour, she understood. She felt that she had been chosen to do something almost no one would ever be offered, why? She had no clue

There was only one condition.

Her body had to die.

Suddenly, Jenna saw the people she would leave behind. Her partner would become a widow. Her son would grow up without a mother. From his 2 year old perspective, perhaps believing that she chose to leave him. Her parents would bury their daughter. And Jenna understood her answer.

No.

She chose to go back. She chose a 9-5 job, laundry, a mortgage, and aging parents. She chose being needed. She chose watching her child grow older while knowing she would grow older too.

She chose an ordinary, finite life.

For months afterward, Jenna thought the dream had been about death. Then one day, she understood.

Something had needed to die.

Just not her.

For years, Jenna had thought of commitment as the closing of doors. Somewhere inside her still lived the person who could theoretically go anywhere, become anyone, answer only to herself.

But she wasn't that person anymore. She was a partner. A mother. A daughter watching her parents grow older. And perhaps growing up wasn't about dragging every previous version of herself into the future.

Perhaps some selves were supposed to end. Not because they were mistakes but because they had finished their work.

Jenna hadn't rejected the unknown that night. She had chosen something greater.

She had chosen to belong to her life.

Sometimes moving forward means grieving a version of ourselves we aren't meant to be anymore. Therapy can give you space to understand what's changing, what you're leaving behind, and who you're becoming.

If you're standing between who you were and what's next, you don't have to figure it out alone.