The story we mean to write

“The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story and writes another.”

- J.M. Barrie

I saw this quote from the J.M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, a few weeks ago in an Economist newsletter and I have been thinking about it. I feel this is true for me, and probably a common experience for most people, especially as we get to a certain age. It’s not just that we have aspirations to do or become certain things, and those things often don’t come to pass. It’s that we aspire to the wrong things, things that we are not meant to do or be because they aren’t good matches for who we really are. Life is a process of discovery, of repeated epiphanies. With the arc of time, when you look back, you can see the things you keep coming back to. We write a different story than the one we mean because we write the one that is a better fit for us. The painful part is reconciling the two, and coming to terms with the fact that the one you write is the one you were meant to write.