CULTURE

All the People I’ve Wanted to Be

You only get one life. You can’t live all of them.

Me, getting my one and only tattoo. It’s the first two lines of a Rilke poem in the original German. (Photo by Michelle Teheux)

There is a version of my life in which I moved to Europe and became a regular at a writers’ café in Paris, like Hemingway in the 1920s. I would have drunk absinthe.

I also wanted to raise many feral children on a hobby farm. My children would feed the chickens, gather their eggs and help pick apples and can tomatoes. We would all read classic novels voraciously. We’d argue about literature over dinner every night.

I also wanted to design an off-the-grid house out in the country. Maybe a cobb house. Maybe a straw bale house. Maybe a geodesic dome — I’ve considered every alternative house ever at some point.

I debated — start planting the fruit orchard first so the trees are bearing by the time the house is finished, or get the house done first? — even though I knew there was no chance I’d be able to afford such a place until well after my body was too old to handle all the work involved.

In high school, a friend and I intended to move to New York City after graduation and become book editors. Where I thought I’d get the money to cover the cost of reaching NYC and paying for even one month’s rent while I applied for jobs in the publishing industry was never quite…