The Roads I Didn’t Travel – In Another Life, I Stayed

Last week, I visited a past version of myself. A pilgrimage, if you will, to a life I could have had – but didn’t – for one reason or another.

As a child, I was fortunate enough to experience holidays in different countries. Cultures, languages, foods, environments, and histories that were unlike my own. Now, as an adult, I realise just how much those experiences shaped me – my values, my ways of seeing and being, my appreciation for humanity in all its forms. 

But one country carved me a little more deeply – intricately – than the rest.

Revisiting Türkiye – 27 years after first stepping onto her land, and 15 years since I last left her – was jarring. It was thick with nostalgia, full of reflection, and threaded with awareness that I am who I am because of this place. These people.

I had a plan, once.

My parents built a home there after years of falling in love with the country, and I was lucky – and keen – to be able to return again and again. Long stays. Deep immersion. I soaked up the rhythm of daily life, collected fragments of the language, formed friendships and connections. It became a second home – or the possibility of one. 

The plan was simple: qualify as a paediatric nurse in England, then move to Türkiye to practice.

That plan…never happened.

And yet, while I was there last week, I could feel that alternate version of me – close. Sense her presence, see the smudged edges of her superimposed onto this current timeline. Like…if we both just stretched and reached a little further across these adjacent lives…our fingertips might touch.

It was a full-circle moment, in many ways. My entire family travelled with me – sixteen of us. More of us than ever and yet also…fewer. We’d lost some people along the way. We stayed in the same town we’d once ‘grown up’ in. My children now stood at the same ages I was when I first began to dream this life I never lived.

There’s a strange stillness in looking backwards like that. Walking the same dusty roads, knowing they no longer lead to the same destination. Returning to a place I once imagined building an entire life. Suspended. Held. Floating. Half-welcome. Half-wanting. Half-mine, and half-not.

Some younger version of me still lives there. 

Ghostlike.

Zipping around on a moped. Hopping water taxis. Speaking fluent Turkish with ease. Haggling at the market for the juiciest peaches. Holding a different surname. Maybe even with different children.

Would she have been happy? At peace? Which one of us made the right choice?

To hold up this mirror – to see both the reflection of myself as I am now, and the reflection of someone I never was – so deliberately, but with a fear that holding onto this image too tight might cause it to crack was…weird. It was almost dissociative, if I wasn’t so aware of it. 

There was a sort of grief. A yearning, maybe? In the not knowing – and the knowing I never will. But also, a quiet relief. Gratitude, even. Because this life, the one I did choose – shaped me, too.

I saw her in flickers. Her sun-kissed skin, her worn-in sandals. Reflected in a shop window. Waving to a friend. Whispering merhaba. Crossing the plaj. Sitting at a street-side table, tearing ekmek, sipping tiny glasses of tea, licking salty olive juice from her fingers.

What I felt when I saw her wasn’t envy.

It was recognition. A reminder that she still exists. I know her, and part of her lives somewhere inside me, too.

Because although every path taken means another gets left behind – to choose one life doesn’t mean you need to completely bury another.

I said goodbye to past-me last week.

But I also said thank you.

For dreaming big things. For wanting more. For giving me something to grieve. For reminding me that she’s still there. 

I hope she’s proud of the life I chose for us both.