How I Think My Life Would Have Turned Out in Other Timelines

Do you ever wildly speculate about yourself? When I started becoming more interested in who I am, I started thinking and wondering and well, playing out what I thought my life would be like through those “what ifs” that I answered with a no.

When I started to write this I thought of so many things I could write here, but I know as much as I find this interesting, no one is as interested in my life as I am. Thus, I chose two of the most-blogged about here topics of the recent years.

Getting Married

At one point, as we tried to determine out if we could repair the shattered glass from my request for postponing the wedding, my fiancé said, “I’m afraid if we don’t get married now we never will.” I took that in and replied, “Is it better to break up now or get a divorce later?” Silence.

Had I gotten married I think there would have been several different storylines of damage. I think my friends would have been damaged from my demand for perfection and extreme adherence to my wedding vision. The entire focus was the wedding because I knew I didn’t want to get married but thought I could deceive myself into thinking I could just have a perfect wedding to make up for that.

This would be year two of being married. At this point I would have made the decision to double-down, never tell anyone it was a mistake and put on a grand façade. Classic enneagram 3. The other alternative would be that I would have filed for divorce or in the process of it. I would be 30, married, a step-mother and step-grandmother and a stranger to myself.

I truly don’t see how our relationship would have recovered in any state. Whether he knew I was having doubts or not. Whether he liked it or not.

This storyline is the summary of what I say frequently, “At the end of the day, no one else has to live with but yourself.” You need to be utterly in love with that person first before you even think about loving someone else.

Didn’t Move

I’ve been told to be brutally honest about my experience in Kansas as that’s how I’m feeling and it’s valid. I’ve been asked by my friends who live in Kansas to please not be so unkind to where they live. I think the unfortunate thing about being Alissa, my all-or-nothing, be-everything-at-10,000% means I have to wildly experience both ends of the emotional spectrum before I can find the middle. I’m still on the negative end of the spectrum so I’m going to try to summarize this in how I think I’ll feel when I get to the gray.

Kansas wove her DNA in me by being where I’ve spent all my life until now. For that I am thankful and I met incredible people who are mine. My people. When you were in her as long as I was, you don’t have any outside perspective. How can a fish describe what it’s like to be in water? They don’t know where they are until they come up for air and their surroundings are different.

I am that fish who gasped for air when she came to the surface (Illinois) and realized water is wet. Not in the smarty-pants way, but in the oh wow, I can’t even describe what I was in because I was so in it. The realization of Kansas nice, the lack of diversity, performative white-people who pick and choose their causes while ignoring the privilege of this is so pervasive it makes up the DNA.

I would have become apathetic to the injustice of the world as I didn’t feel it impact how we were in Kansas, Wichita specifically. Old comfort habits would have taken over and I would have felt myself becoming stodgy and complacent. I would have drank the Kool-Aid water that Wichita was the greatest place on earth because you can afford a home of 28, but not realized it’s because there is literally nothing to do, despite our best marketing campaigns to make us believe otherwise. I would have continued to live in fear of my ex and continued to only exist within 2-3 blocks of my home, never going to restaurants or stores for fear of running into them. I would have gained a lot of weight. Wichita ranks in obesity nationwide for a reason.

The reality is we never know what plot twists life has for us. Good or bad. But sometimes I feel so clearly that even with life’s unknowns, I have a really good idea of the trajectory I was headed towards. It’s almost like gossiping about yourself, which is kind of fun to gossip about you to yourself.

What’s your alternative timeline story?