"I Can Always Go Back"

There's a road you didn't take.

Maybe it was a career you considered but rejected. A relationship you let go. A city you almost moved to. A path you glimpsed and then, for reasons that made sense at the time, walked past.

That road is still there, you tell yourself. It's waiting. If things don't work out on this path, you can always go back. You can always return to the fork in the road, retrace your steps, choose differently.

This is the fourth lie of deferral: the fantasy of the reversible life.

And it may be the most seductive of all—because unlike the other lies, this one offers not just comfort but escape. You don't need to commit fully to this path because there's always another path available. You don't need to grieve the choices you've made because you can always unmake them.

Except you can't.

Heraclitus understood this twenty-five centuries ago.

You cannot step in the same river twice. The water that flowed past your feet a moment ago is already downstream, replaced by new water, which is even now flowing past and being replaced in turn. The river you stepped in no longer exists. It never stopped changing long enough to be the same river twice.

But here's the part people miss: it's not the same man either.

You have also changed. The experiences since you last stood here have altered you. The time that passed left marks. The person who steps into the river now is not the person who could have stepped in then.

This is why you can't go back. Not because the world won't let you—but because there's no "back" to go to. The past is not a place waiting for your return. It's gone. It changed while you were away, and so did you.

Loss is change. And change is constant. Marcus didn't say this to minimize grief—he said it to clarify reality. The thing you think you lost, the place you think you can return to, the choice you think you can unmake—these never stopped changing. You're not grieving a place. You're grieving a moment, and moments cannot be recovered.

Every choice closes doors.

When you chose this career, you foreclosed a thousand others. The skills you didn't develop. The networks you didn't build. The identities you didn't inhabit. They're not waiting for you—they've moved on, filled by others, transformed beyond recognition.

When you chose this partner, you closed the door on every other person you might have built a life with. Some of them married others. Some of them moved away. Some of them became different people than they were when the door was open.

When you chose this city, this path, this way of living—you stepped through a door and it closed behind you. You can leave through a different door. You can make new choices. But you cannot go back through the door you came through. It doesn't exist anymore.

The fantasy of reversal says: these doors are still open, waiting, available if needed. The reality says: doors close. Some of them lock. Most of them disappear entirely.

"We cannot go back. We can only go forward."

— Libba Bray

Forward is the only direction available. Not because backward is forbidden, but because backward doesn't exist. There is only the present moment and the choices available within it. The past is a story you tell, not a place you can visit.

In The Count of Monte Cristo, Edmond Dantès spends fourteen years in prison dreaming of return.

He will return to Marseilles. He will return to his father. He will return to Mercédès, the woman he loves. He will return to the life that was stolen from him and resume it as if nothing had happened.

When he finally escapes, he discovers the truth: there is no going back.

His father is dead—starved while Edmond rotted in prison. Mercédès has married Fernand, one of the men who betrayed him. The friends of his youth have become the enemies of his present. The life he dreamed of reclaiming has dissolved into history.

The old Edmond is dead. A new man—the Count of Monte Cristo—has emerged from the wreckage. He cannot return to the life he lost because he is no longer the person who lived it. The naive young sailor who believed in justice and love was destroyed in that cell. What walks out is something else entirely.

This is what the fantasy of return ignores: you are not the same person who left. The experiences that led you away also transformed you. The person who could have lived that life no longer exists. You have become someone else—someone who must find a new path because the old one was built for a different person.

Why does it matter if we believe we can go back?

Because the fantasy prevents commitment.

If you think the other path is still available, you never fully invest in this one. You keep one foot in the present and one foot in an imaginary past. You hold something back, just in case. You never give yourself completely to the life you're actually living because you're preserving the option of a life you're not.

This is the hidden cost: the fantasy of reversal makes the present half-lived. You're here, but not entirely. You're committed, but with reservations. You're building a life while secretly maintaining an escape route to a life that no longer exists.

But there's another form of unnecessary suffering: grieving what you never actually lost, because you never actually had it. The path not taken was only ever a fantasy. The life you imagine you could return to exists only in imagination. You're suffering over a ghost—and the suffering prevents you from embracing what's real.

But here's what no one tells you about irreversibility:

It's liberating.

When you accept that you cannot go back—truly accept it, not as a tragedy but as a fact—something remarkable happens. The energy you've been spending on preserving the escape route becomes available for other uses. The mental space you've been dedicating to the fantasy becomes available for the present.

You stop comparing this life to the imaginary life you could have lived. You stop measuring the present against an impossible standard. You stop suffering over doors that closed years ago.

And you start—maybe for the first time—fully inhabiting the life you actually have.

Accept what fate has bound you to. Not grudgingly, not while looking over your shoulder at what might have been—but fully, with all your heart. This is the only life you have. These are the only people you're with. This is the only path available. Love it. Commit to it. Stop pretending there's a back door.

The back door is a fantasy. And fantasies, however comforting, are prisons of their own kind.

There's a practice I recommend to people paralyzed by the fantasy of reversal.

Write in ink.

Literally: when you journal, when you take notes, when you make lists—use ink, not pencil. No erasing. No going back. What's written stays written. Mistakes are crossed out but still visible. The record is permanent.

This seems small, but it's training for something larger: learning to live as if the ink is permanent. Because it is. Every choice is written in ink. Every day that passes is a page that can't be rewritten.

When you internalize this—when you stop treating life like a draft that can be revised and start treating it like a final copy being written in real time—something shifts. You become more careful. More intentional. More present.

Not paralyzed—liberated. Because once you accept that you can't go back, you stop wasting energy on the fantasy and start investing it in what's here.

What you think about, you become. If you spend your days dreaming of paths not taken, your soul takes on that color—nostalgic, regretful, half-present. If you spend your days fully inhabiting the path you're on, your soul takes on a different color—engaged, committed, alive.

Choose the color deliberately. Stop looking backward at roads that have disappeared. Start writing this page, in ink, with full attention.

The lies are now exposed.

"There's always tomorrow"—but there isn't. "I'll start when I'm ready"—but readiness comes from starting. "They already know"—but they don't, not until you tell them. "I can always go back"—but the past is not a place.

These are the lies we tell ourselves to avoid the weight of mortality. To pretend the book doesn't end. To keep comfortable in the illusion that we have unlimited time and unlimited options.

In the next part, we'll turn to something different. Not the lies we tell, but the truths others have learned—often too late. The regrets of the dying. The wisdom purchased at the highest price: a lifetime of error finally understood when understanding can no longer change anything.

They learned so you don't have to.

Let's listen.