A few years ago, I sat in a room celebrating the life of a woman named Amanda.
She was forty.
I didn’t know her well. She was the sister of a dear friend, and over the years we’d spent holidays together.
But that didn’t seem to matter.
Sitting there, listening to people tell stories about her life, I remember having a thought that, given the circumstances, was probably the most obvious thought in the world.
I could go to bed tonight and not wake up tomorrow.
Or I could get a diagnosis that changes everything.
Or a phone call.
Or an accident.
None of us are promised another thirty years.
Or thirty days.
Or tomorrow morning.
I left that celebration convinced something had shifted inside me.
I remember thinking I needed to spend more time with the people I loved. I wanted my family and closest friends to know how much they meant to me—not just because I told them, but because they could feel it in the way I showed up.
Looking back, that realization changed my awareness much more than it changed my behavior.
Life resumed.
Habits and patterns are remarkably good at surviving revelations.
As an adolescent, I had a fairly logical roadmap for life.
Graduate from high school.
Go to university.
Get a job.
Get married.
Have children.
That was simply the sequence I grew up around.
At some point, perhaps after I moved to the U.S., my version of that roadmap changed.
I knew I didn’t want to get married until I had established myself professionally. And I knew I didn’t want children until I was financially secure.
Not just comfortable.
Secure.
I wanted the kind of financial freedom where having children wouldn’t mean losing myself.
Where I could afford help.
Where I could continue building a career I loved.
Where motherhood didn’t require giving up every other part of me.
I have a systematic mind. A logical mind. 1 + 1 = 2.
You take the first step, then you take the next.
So somewhere along the way, without realizing it, my logic became:
I’ll build the life first.
Then I’ll live it.
I never said those words out loud.
I don’t think I even knew I believed them.
But they quietly organized the next twenty-five years of my life.
When I moved to the United States at seventeen, that sequence became even stronger.
I wanted stability. I wanted to be my own person. I wanted to be financially independent so that I could make my own decisions.
I wasn’t trying to build an extraordinary life.
I was trying to build a stable one.
Now, I can look back and say I’ve had an amazing life. And I want the second chapter of it to be extraordinary.
But that wasn’t what seventeen-year-old me was trying to do.
If you’ve read my last few essays, you know I’ve been reflecting a lot on safety.
I grew up in a place where stability wasn’t guaranteed. Then I moved halfway across the world with little more than hope, ambition, and the belief that if I worked hard enough, I could build a different kind of future.
So I did what made sense.
I studied.
I worked.
I achieved.
My younger self solved the problem she was living with.
She was building a life where she could finally exhale.
And honestly, I’m so deeply grateful for the life I’ve had; a life that, as a little girl, I didn’t even have the imagination to dream about.
When I was thirty-six, I froze my eggs.
Why thirty-six?
Because I had finally reached a point where I could afford it.
I’d been reading about egg freezing for years. If I could have done it at thirty without going into debt, I would have.
But I couldn’t.
So I waited until I could.
At the time, I was completely convinced I didn’t want children.
Or at least I thought I was.
Every evening I injected myself with hormones, alone, wondering what exactly I was doing.
Then I’d remind myself.
I’m doing this so I don’t wake up one day regretting that I never gave myself the option.
That was enough.
One cycle.
One possibility.
One attempt at preserving an option.
The fertility specialist showed me the statistics.
I honestly don’t remember the exact numbers anymore.
I remember understanding them intellectually.
I definitely didn’t understand them emotionally.
Now, looking back, I can see that.
I thought one cycle was enough because, after all, I didn’t really think I’d ever need those eggs.
Maybe I’d meet someone.
Maybe I’d have children naturally.
Maybe I truly didn’t want children.
Or maybe it was a defense mechanism.
I still don’t know.
Life would probably sort itself out.
There would be time.
Lately I’ve been thinking about that version of me a lot.
It’s tempting to look back and tell her everything she should have done differently.
Freeze your eggs earlier.
Do more than one cycle.
Work a little less.
Spend more time with your parents.
But that would require her to know what I know now.
She couldn’t.
She made thoughtful decisions with the information, resources, and emotional capacity she had at the time.
She wasn’t careless.
She wasn’t asleep.
She wasn’t choosing the wrong things.
She was solving the problem that felt most urgent.
Safety.
I don’t want to judge her.
I want to thank her.
I’m proud of the decisions she made.
She built the life I’m standing in today.
I’m simply living with a different set of questions than the ones she had.
One of those questions has surprised me.
For years, I told myself I didn’t want children.
Now, I’m not so sure.
And there’s another layer to this that I’m only beginning to understand.
I was sexually molested as a young girl. Choice matters deeply to me. Having agency over my own life and my own body matters deeply to me.
So maybe that’s part of why losing the possibility of choosing feels different from simply losing the outcome.
Do I want children?
Do I not?
Am I saying I want them because I’ve been told I may have waited too long?
Or because I truly do?
I don’t know.
And then another question appears.
Am I grieving the possibility of motherhood?
Or am I grieving the possibility of choosing it?
Those aren’t the same thing.
The older I get, the more I realize that some of the most important questions in my life have refused to be rushed simply because I wanted an answer.
A little over a year ago, I made another decision that surprised some people.
I moved to Puerto Rico.
Part of the reason I moved was because I realized I didn’t want to keep postponing the rest of my life while I was building it.
I wanted mornings that belonged to me.
I wanted to walk by the ocean on a Tuesday.
I wanted my life to feel like something I was participating in instead of something I was constantly preparing for.
That doesn’t mean I stopped being ambitious.
I’m not sure I know how.
I still wake up excited by difficult problems.
I still want to build new things that matter.
None of that changed.
What changed was my understanding of what success could actually give me.
Success gave me opportunities.
Freedom.
Choices.
Experiences I never imagined I’d have when I was seventeen.
What it couldn’t do was create more time.
That was never its job.
I used to think my life would begin after enough things were in place.
After the business was stable.
After I found the right partner.
After I felt financially secure.
After...
The sentence never really ended.
It just found new endings.
I’ve since realized that my obsession with financial security goes much deeper than money. During the Hoffman Process, I started seeing how tangled it was with questions of self-worth and whether I felt like I was enough. That’s probably another essay.
I was not postponing things I didn’t value.
I was postponing the things I assumed would patiently wait for me.
Stillness.
Presence.
Friendships that deserved more than squeezed-in dinners between flights.
Questions about love.
Questions about family.
Questions about who I wanted to become now that survival wasn’t driving every decision anymore.
I kept asking those parts of my life to wait because I genuinely believed there would be another season for them.
I’ve been wondering lately if one of the biggest illusions of adulthood isn’t that life is long.
It’s that we believe our future selves will somehow become people with different priorities.
That she’ll be the one who finally slows down.
Finally chooses differently.
As though she’ll inherit more courage than we have today.
But she’s just us.
Only older.
I spent decades asking one question.
How do I build a life where I finally feel safe?
It was the right question for that season of my life.
I’m grateful I asked it.
I’m grateful for the woman who spent years answering it.
These days, though, I’m asking something different.
Maybe that’s the difference between the woman I was and the woman I’m becoming.
One was trying to build a life that felt safe.
The other is trying to be fully present inside the life she’s already built.
I’ve finally realized my life wasn’t waiting on the other side of all that building.
It was happening while I was doing it.
If I can no longer rely on time to quietly make my choices for me...
What do I choose now?
Paola
Every essay starts with my own life: my experiences, journals, voice notes, questions, and conversations. I write multiple drafts, rethink my assumptions, and revise relentlessly until the piece says what I actually mean. I use AI as an editorial partner to help organize ideas, improve clarity, and challenge my thinking. The experiences are mine. The perspective is mine. The final judgment about every word is mine.
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