A year ago, I had three fairly different versions of my life in front of me.
I could stay in Dubai, where I had already started building a career and knew what an ordinary week looked like. I could move to Norway for a job and start over somewhere completely unfamiliar. Or I could come to the US for graduate school as I had an RA position that covered my tuition and gave me a stipend.
I chose the US.
At the time, it felt like an easy choice. I wanted to study further and the funding made it an easy option. So I turned down the other paths and moved on.
What is strange is that the weight of the decision showed up later.
Every now and then, I guess also because of the uncertain changes in rules in the US, I think about Norway. But Norway is almost too easy to miss. I never lived there, so nothing ever happened to ruin the version of it in my head. There was never a dark winter or a frustrating day at work. The life I imagine there gets to remain untainted with imperfections as it never had a chance to become ordinary.
Dubai feels different.
I actually had a life there. It was a new job however I knew the people, the places around me and what a normal week felt like. When I think about staying, I am not imagining an alternate life from scratch. I am extending one that already existed.
I've realized those are two very different kinds of nostalgia: missing something you had, and missing something you never got to have.
Neither means I regret coming here.
I'm glad I chose graduate school. I have gotten to work on problems I probably would not have encountered otherwise and built a different version of my life.
But I think I used to assume that making the decision would eventually make the alternatives stop feeling meaningful.
It hasn't.
My dad put it more simply when I was deciding, “you should spend a lot of time thinking about the choices before you make one. Once you choose, the work is making something of it.”
Maybe that is the strange thing about real choices. The paths you do not take do not disappear. But eventually, the question stops being which path was best and becomes what you make of the one you chose.