The Burden of Infinite Selves
What will you do with your one wild and precious life?
The question hung in the air between us like incense, meant to inspire, meant to clarify. My therapist's voice carried that particular tone of gentle urgency that practitioners perfect—the one that suggests breakthrough is just around the corner if only you'll reach for it. With a gentle prod in a quiet, soothing room. Using a frequently quoted Mary Oliver poem that resonates with plenty of people I respect….but always grates me.
After all, I contained multitudes, and I knew it. Hell, it was the title of my college admissions essay (I mean lyric poem): Multiplicity of One. I knew when I was 17 that I didn’t have an easy path, or a singular one.
While she spoke of one life, and with a gentle urgency that wasn’t exactly needed on my side—after all, my one life as I knew it, with all its attendant compromises, losses, and desire to make lemonade of so many lemons—had imploded pretty spectacularly. And back then, I thought that was my lot in life: to compromise, to survive, to rise from the ash, to hold it together in spite of whatever happened for others who depended on me then.
I felt the weight of dozens of fragmented, yet unlived whole selves pressing against my ribs. The artist whose fingers still smelled of turpentine despite years away from a canvas. The writer whose notebooks overflowed with half-finished novels. The science major who could have unlocked something beautiful in a laboratory somewhere. The teacher who might have changed lives. The entrepreneur with business plans sketched on napkins. The activist whose willing spirit for that work waned not from lack of passion, but from too much of it. It would have consumed her.
Each potential self lived fully formed in my mind, complete with career trajectories and daily routines, with the specific satisfaction each path would bring. I could taste the grant money, feel the stage lights, hear the applause, smell the coffee in different offices across different pasts and futures. They weren't fantasies—they were blueprints I was capable of building, lives I was qualified to live. Ones I had briefly occupied, even.
This is the particular torment of the multiply gifted: not the fear that you can't do something, but the certainty that you could do almost anything, and the devastating knowledge that choosing one means murdering all the others.
What will you do with your one wild and precious life? Oh, dear Mary.
The question assumes scarcity where I experienced abundance. It assumes clarity where I lived in the fog of infinite possibility. Most people worry about “finding” their calling; I worried about silencing the symphony of callings that competed for attention in my head every morning when I woke up, and every afternoon when I walked alone long enough to daydream.
Each day became an exercise in necessary betrayal. Say nothing of the fact that pragmatic reality drove me to stay in a corporate job to support my family. Every choice was also a small death, a universe unexplored. I carried the ghosts of my unlived lives like phantom limbs—still feeling sensation in paths I'd never taken.
The worst part wasn't the choosing itself, but the way others mistook my hesitation for laziness, my depth for lack of focus, my awareness of alternatives for inability to commit. They couldn't see that what looked like paralysis was actually the vertigo that comes from standing at the edge of too many cliffs, each one offering a different kind of flight.
What will you do with your one wild and precious life?
I wanted to answer: Which one? Which of the twelve careers I could excel at? Which of the five languages I could master? Which of the three graduate degrees that would open different doors (one of which I’d started and bitterly walked away from at 21)? Which version of myself deserves to live while the others suffocate in the space between dream and decision?
But instead I nodded and said I'd think about it, knowing that thinking was precisely the problem. I had thought about it so thoroughly that I could write dissertations on lives I'd never lived, craft detailed memoirs of experiences I'd never had.
The question was designed to inspire urgency, to push past the comfort zone of indecision, the excuse of not knowing. But for those of us who carry multiple potential selves, urgency isn't the issue—it's the mathematics of loss. Every path taken means ten others abandoned. Every door opened means a dozen others locked forever.
Maybe the real question isn't what to do with one wild and precious life, but how to live with the knowledge that you're simultaneously failing to live up to all of your potential while also living more fully than most people dare to imagine. While people look on with wide eyes and wonder, “How do you do all that?” Maybe the answer isn't choosing the one perfect path, but learning to mourn the others with grace. Or integrate them with gratitude, albeit for the fractional experience they can become.
Maybe wild and precious is the way to integrate all that multifacetedness into a singular. Maybe it means accepting that you are vast, that you contain multitudes, and that the tragedy and beauty of being multiply gifted is that you will always be more than any one life can contain. Unless you create it in such a way that you get to express at least a few more aspects of being than other people have shown you how to do.
Growing up as a Generation X middle class kid, the first generation going to college in my nuclear family, a message I received in my youth was that my career was the way to become something. But careers….at least a whole lot of jobs….like to consume you whole if you let them. And of course, so will marriage (or at least motherhood). Or caregiving. And I have done some of that, too.
Some people advocate sequencing, or fractionalizing. What about when your facets add up to far more than that? It’s a disco ball in there.
My favorite people look like entirely different people from one photograph to the next. The smile is different. The gaze. The posture. The presence. I have a good friend who exemplifies this for me. Every photo I see is a different version of her, staring back. I adore that about her. It’s reflective of feedback I have received about me. So I feel I know her, as she knows me, differently from the people who always show up the same. Maybe that’s evidence of a “more consistent personal brand,” but I dig what’s real, and I dig people who are complex.
The gift and the curse are the same: you know exactly what you're giving up. And you choose anyway, carrying your unlived lives like love letters to the person you might have been, in the world you might have built, with the talents you left sleeping in the drawer of some other version of yourself. I will choose one, and grieve the rest, and call that being human. To the extent I can incorporate wild, that’s important to me. To the extent that things become precious, that becomes something to celebrate.
