Prompt 165. In Another Life

Novelist Ilana Masad on reframing regret

Kebili, Tunisia, New Year’s 2018

Hi friend,

I spent the week putting together a box of things to ship to my mom in Tunisia. She and my dad are spending the year there—she won a Fulbright, and she’s teaching and working on a community art project. Last week, over a very crackly Facetime connection, she explained that rolls of painting tape and notebooks and books would soon be arriving—and arrive they did. She’d left one box here during her last visit, but to fit everything, I had to buy a bigger box—it would not contain her creativity. 

Selfishly I’m sad they’re so far away, but I’m so so happy for my mom and so proud of her—even in awe of her. Around the time that most people are preparing for retirement, she’s restarting her life as an artist. Not that she ever really quit painting, but she did scale back her career to raise my brother and me, and then in my early 20s, to be my caregiver when I got sick. She always did wonder, “What if?” Now and then she would say, “Maybe if we had stayed in New York City…”

What she’s doing now reveals the lie that things have to happen on a certain timeline. She’s calling the shots, doing so with skill and ambition and a deep commitment to her work. It would’ve been so easy to sink into regret, to feel a sense of bitterness about missed opportunities. Instead she’s leaning into future possibilities in such a full, rich, beautiful way.

But of course, sometimes we make a choice that does foreclose other possibilities—and what do we do then? Today’s prompt from the extraordinary novelist and literary critic Ilana Masad considers this question in a new light, one that reframes the regret and allows us to celebrate both the lives we lived and the ones we didn’t.

Sending love,

Suleika

P.S. On October 31, I’m hosting the great Kate Bowler for a Studio Visit, and her new book No Cure for Being Human is our October Book Club pick. To join us become a paid subscriber (just $6 a month)!

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Mesdemoiselles de l’Isle Adam by René Magritte,1942

Prompt 165. In Another Life by Ilana Masad

When I was seven, I decided that I wanted to be an actor when I grew up. My parents let me take acting classes at a local community center, and I worked my little heart out at it. I even attended a performing-arts junior high for a couple years. When I didn’t get into the high school’s audition-based drama program, I pretty much gave up, letting that dream die a long, painful death. 

In another life, I didn’t quit. I don’t know if I succeeded, or if I ever made it, as it were, but I didn’t quit. 

When I was in college, I ruined a relationship with a woman I was head over heels smitten with because I was scared of letting go of a summer fling that felt like love. In another life, I threw myself wholly into the new relationship, and we had more time. Maybe we broke up eventually. Maybe we didn’t. 

In another life, I’ve become a therapist. In another, I am still with my first long-term boyfriend, my first love. In a third, I am a rabbi. In a fourth, I am already a parent. In a fifth, I figure out a way to live in London. In a sixth, my father is still alive. In a seventh, I never left New York City. And on, and on, and on.

I will never live these other lives, and some days, that breaks my heart. Some days, I grieve the loss of what ended, the loss of what never was or never will be. Many days, I chastise myself for this grief: The past is the past, my mean inner voice says, and Count your blessings! and Don’t be so ungrateful, look at all you do have! 

I am trying to be kinder to myself. And in those moments of kindness, I remember that I am a writer, a storyteller, and that my ability to imagine all these other lives, to see the paths that weren’t, aren’t, never will be, is a gift. What if I embraced that gift? What if, instead of regret over the weren’ts, aren’ts, never-will-bes, I allowed myself to revel in fantasy, in my ability to imagine these possibilities? 

What if, in other words, I allowed myself to see the imagined lives unlived as part and parcel of a life well lived? 

Your prompt for the week:

Think of a moment when you made a decision that was painful or difficult. Imagine what might have happened if you had made a different decision. What would the consequences have been? Who might you have become? Write about that self and their story—let them live on the page.

If you’d like, you can post your response in the comments below, in our Facebook group, or on Instagram by tagging @theisolationjournals.

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Today’s Contributor

Ilana Masad is a fiction writer and critic whose writing has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, NPR, Buzzfeed, Catapult, Joyland Magazine, StoryQuarterly, and many more. Masad is a doctoral student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and is the author of the novel All My Mother's Lovers. Photo by Joshua A. Redwine.

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