It’s feels deeply unfair to have to be one person in this life. To only experience one path, one line of decisions unfolding chronologically. I don’t mean a life filled with regret, but instead a reckoning with limitation.

In this sense, the idea of reincarnation is appealing to me. I’ve had dreams where I’ve felt like I’ve embodied the lives of other people vastly different from my own. Some of the memories still linger in me, ones of different bodies, of different minds.

My gravitation to telling stories has quelled my indignation with the limitations of this body. So I write and I act as that is the closest way for me to embody other lives within this one. It is the only way for me to withstand the pain of growing older, and the narrowing of life’s possibilities, different paths dropping off like dead flies with the passing of each year.

When we are children, life stretches out in front of us as an endless path of potential. Who will you be? Is a question that is asked of us constantly. My friend’s child when asked this recently replied, “everything.” I relate. I remember that feeling of excitement at the vast unknown of life stretching out before me. I still have that I suppose, but with age the path becomes narrower, and the past weighs heavier.

And of course, denying this would mean losing the richness of a life well lived. There is a beauty in commitment, growth, and stability that I would miss out on if I remained endlessly indecisive, flitting from one thing to another for the rest of my days. I would lose out on depth, stability, understanding, and the strength that comes through persistence. Life is lived both inwards and outwards. Every person requires a particular balance of stasis and change at different points in their life in order to remain sane.

To deny my limits I would also deny the specificity of me – my personality, my family, my history, my likes and dislikes. In my attempt to be everybody and everything, I would be nobody. Yet, I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t rebel against that in some way.

In job interviews when I was asked why I wanted to work in film, I would say because I want to live many lives within this one. Each project is a new task for the imagination, the depth of research and embodiment almost enough to trick myself into believing I could drop in and out of different lives like outfits. This is a gift for my restless spirit who strains against the leash of limitation, and yet is learning to understand the true gift that is this one life.

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