All The Women I Could Have Been: On Midlife, Choice, and the Parallel Lives We Carry
There's a version of me who still plays Chopin in Venice every evening.
She graduated from the conservatory. She chose music over everything else. Her fingers know every sonata by heart, and when she plays, the room goes quiet. She never had to say, "I used to be a pianist." She just is one.
Then there's the version who never left her village. Who stayed rooted in one place, one language, one community. Who played the organ at Sunday Mass, knew every neighbor's name, helped at the May fair, stood behind the counter at her parents' hardware store. Who belonged somewhere so completely that she never had to explain where she was from or why her accent sounds different or how to pronounce her last name.
And there's the one with the business card that says International Liaison Officer. The one who traveled by choice, not orders. Who built a career connecting countries and cultures, who spent her days doing exactly what she trained for. Whose passport was full of purpose, not just stamps from places she was stationed.
I think about these women more than I probably should.
Not every day. But often enough. Usually late at night when I can't sleep, or when I'm playing the piano and remembering what it felt like to practice eight hours a day. Or when I'm scrolling through photos of my village in Italy and feeling that sharp pull of homesickness for a life I left behind thirty years ago.
Sometimes I miss them.
Not with regret. More like a quiet ache for what will never be true.
The Life I Actually Chose
Because here's what actually happened: I got married. To an American man in the U.S. Air Force whose work carried us across continents. Germany. England. The States. Back to Italy, but never to stay. Always on someone else's timeline. Always packing boxes and saying goodbye and starting over.
I didn't stay in one place. I didn't build the stable career I imagined when I was 25 and full of ambition and multilingual résumés. I didn't become the concert pianist or the diplomat or the woman with deep roots in one community.
Instead, I became an expert at something I never planned to be good at: starting over.
Every three to four years, I learned new words. New systems. New schools for my boys. New doctors, new grocery stores, new neighborhoods where I didn't know anyone. I adapted. I made it work. I raised two sons in foreign lands and languages, and I told myself it was an adventure.
And it was. Some of the time.
But it was also hard in ways I didn't admit for years. Hard to never quite belong anywhere. Hard to introduce myself and see people do the math: Wait, you're Italian but you lived in Russia and England and you married an American and now you're here? Hard to watch other women build careers while I rebuilt my life from scratch every few years. Hard to explain why my piano sits silent more often than not.
I don't regret the life I chose. It gave me stories, strength, resilience, a multicultural family, and two incredible sons. It gave me the woman I am now—someone who can adapt to anything, who speaks multiple languages, who knows how to make a home anywhere.
But I'm learning something I wish someone had told me years ago: you can love the life you have and still grieve the ones you left behind.
The Myth of the Single Self
We're told we have to choose. That if we picked one path, we're not allowed to wonder about the others. That if we're grateful for what we have, we shouldn't feel the pull of what we don't.
But that's bullshit.
We're not single-path creatures. We're not one version of ourselves sealed off from all the others. We're complicated. We're layered. We carry ghosts of the women we almost were, and that doesn't mean we've failed. It means we're human.
The pianist. The rooted woman. The career diplomat. They're all still in here. They show up when I play Chopin and my fingers remember. When I see photos of my village during the May fair. When I watch the news and think, I could have been part of solving this.
These women aren't my enemies. They're not proof that I made the wrong choice.
They're part of who I am. And I'm tired of pretending they don't exist just because the world tells us to "choose one and commit."
What I'm Learning (Badly, Slowly)
I don't have this figured out. I'm not going to give you five steps to inner peace or tell you how to honor your unlived lives while loving the one you have.
But here's what I'm noticing, in my own fumbling way:
Some nights, I sit at the piano and just name them. Out loud. "There's a version of me who plays this every day. Who made this her whole life." And something about saying it—not keeping it locked in my head—takes away some of the sting.
I've also stopped using the word "regret" for this feeling. Because regret means I made the wrong choice, and I didn't. I made the choice that fit my life, my circumstances, my love for a man who took me places I never imagined. What I feel isn't regret. It's grief. Grief for the concert pianist who will never be. Grief for the rooted woman who knew everyone's name. And grief, I'm learning, doesn't mean you chose wrong. It just means something mattered.
The pianist version? She's showing up more now. Not eight hours a day, but when I can. Five minutes. Twenty. An hour on a good day. I'm reclaiming her in small pieces. The rooted version pushes me to build community here, now, instead of waiting until I "settle somewhere permanent." The career woman is part of why I write, why I started Women Rising Strong, why I can't let go of the idea that connecting people across cultures still matters.
They're not dead dreams. They're just... differently alive.
And I'm trying—God, I'm trying—to hold both things at once. To love Lino and this life and to ache sometimes for the version of me who stayed in Italy. To be grateful for my boys and wonder what my career would have looked like if I'd had uninterrupted years to build it. Both/and instead of either/or. But some days the "and" feels impossible, and I just sit with the ache.
I don't know if that's progress. But it's honest.
What Midlife Might Actually Be
I used to think midlife was about settling. About accepting what is and making peace with what isn't.
Now? I think it might be something messier.
Maybe midlife is about gathering up all the versions of yourself—the ones you lived and the ones you didn't—and learning to hold them without choosing. Without ranking them. Without pretending some matter more than others.
Maybe it's about standing in the middle of gratitude and longing and realizing they're not opposites. They're just... both true.
I don't know. I'm still figuring it out.
But what I do know is this: the life I chose gave me stories, strength, resilience, two sons, a multicultural existence I never would have imagined. And the lives I didn't choose still tug at me sometimes in the dark. And I'm done pretending one of those truths cancels out the other.
The Women We Carry
Sometimes I still miss the woman who plays Chopin in Venice every evening.
But I'm learning to let her sit beside me while I play in my living room, when the house is quiet and my boys are grown and my husband is away and I have these stolen hours to remember who I was before I became who I am.
She's not gone. None of them are.
The rooted woman who knew everyone's name. The liaison officer with the impressive business card. The version who had deep roots instead of wide ones.
They're all still here. Not as ghosts. Not as regrets. Just as... parts of me. Parallel lives I carry around like old photographs I can't quite throw away.
I don't have to choose between the woman I am and the women I might have been.
I can carry them all. With tenderness. With honesty. With the knowledge that every choice we make closes some doors and opens others—and that's not failure. That's just what it costs to be human.
You don't have to kill off the versions of yourself you didn't become. You don't have to pretend they don't matter just because you chose differently.
Maybe courage isn't picking the "right" path. Maybe it's picking a path and then learning to live with all the ones you didn't take. To let them whisper to you sometimes. To miss them without hating where you are.
I'm still learning how to do that.
But at least now I'm trying.
With love and all the versions of us,
S.A. Sterling