The Ones We Forgot to Become
Not All Beauty is Meant to Bloom
A meditation on the selves we leave behind, and the quiet wisdom of knowing who we are because of who we never became.
There’s a lake in northern Tanzania whose waters don’t rot the dead.
Its red shallows preserve anything that enters. Birds, bats, creatures either too bold, or too lost. Preserved mid-motion, they become sculptures of salt and stillness. Decay is replaced with suspension… slowing stopping time, as caught in Medusa's gaze.
When I first saw the photos, something primal in me recoiled. It reminded me of something, but I couldn’t explain it; like waking from a dream steeped in a cold sweat that clings to your skin, but all of the details have evaporated.
After awhile I understood: the red lake felt like memory. It reminded me of the parts of myself I left behind. Versions of myself that didn’t decay, but froze. Not decomposed, just stilled. Preserved in silence. Suspended in the red lake of my mind.
It made me think of all the natural wonder preserved in each of us, ideas that never came to life, thoughts that we never brought into action.
How do we know when a version of ourselves slips away?
I think it happens slowly, the way light changes in a room, shadows crawling up the walls, inhabiting the corners sunshine used to be. It’s not dramatic, not violent. It happens for a million reasons— perhaps in the name of momentum, practicality, despair, or even love.
Sometimes the parts we lose aren’t negative. Sometimes we simply grow out of something that no longer suits us, but no matter, it happens either way. No matter what we have done or the reason why, time continues on just the same.
I am here because I choose to be. I, like you, am an amalgamation of all the little choices and larger actions I’ve taken over the course of my life. The friendships I watered, the outfits I wore, the compliments I gave, the smiles I kept to myself. And all the while, with every drum of my heart, I’ve felt a presence inside me— a persistent, yearning, coaxing pulse that speaks to me. It calls to me like a siren, always telling me to keep going, keep going, farther, elsewhere, go. A call to a void I don’t know the name of.
And with every turn, I leave someone behind. Not a stranger. Me. Who I was before.
Sometimes, just for a moment, I remember. I see her again.
I feel it in fleeting, specific bursts of clarity or awareness, the recognition of something I once was, once loved.
I see her handwriting in old notebooks, I hear her melody in an old song. In a moment so swift I’ll smell her old perfume in a crowd, and fall blindingly backwards through time. In these moments, it feels like I never left; It feels like she’s whispering to me, hello, hello! Do you remember me?
Not all these memories hurt; sometimes it’s peaceful, like wet clay left in the open air. Others slipped away without ceremony, without grief. They don’t haunt me. But they didn’t vanish, either.
They are fossilized in my mind, and I become an archaeologist, digging to remember. To find what parts of myself I left unfinished, to harden in the sun, to honor what died without a sound.
I think we all have a place inside us that collects the selves we’ve outgrown, outpaced, or simply never nurtured. The ones we meant to become. The ones we tried on for a season. The ones we quietly let calcify.
Stillness isn’t the absence of becoming. It’s the residue. That’s where the real shape of self reveals itself—not in motion, but in what remains.
Sometimes it makes me sad, and I tell myself that this is simply the price of growth. I can’t hold on to everything, I have to shed my skin to become anew. By the very nature of my desires, I am required to leave parts of myself behind.
I wave to her in the rearview mirror of my memory, I hug her in the corners of my mind. For better or worse, it was always my choice, no matter what I tell myself, or what I received as a consolation prize.
I ask you, my friend, what part of you has quietly fossilized?
Do you have dreams that calcified?
Are you fearful the answer might come in the form of who you could have been?
There is power in knowing who you are. But there is deeper power in knowing who you’re not.
The selves I left behind aren’t regrets—they’re my monuments.
Some were too soft for this world. Others too sharp for the life I wanted to live. But they’re all part of me, and because of that, each one matters. It matters not how many mistakes they made, or how different we are from each other. They matter, because they were mine. They matter because they were me.
My Luna moth hovers around me, in the periphery of all my choices, watching me with eerie tenderness.
I don’t know when she arrived, only that she has never left. She whispers little memories of all the lives I could have lived, the lives I almost stepped into. Thousands of times, I almost lived a completely different life.
The person I am now will change. Next year, next month, maybe even tomorrow.
She’ll find this essay again, oh, how long ago it will feel, and taste bittersweet nostalgia for the woman who wrote all this down.
Not every version of you will get to live. Not every version should. However, I think you owe it to yourself to remember them. To visit, every once in awhile. To say: You were real, even if just in my imagination. You helped shape the part of me who kept going, the one that got to stay.
We don’t need to resurrect our past selves. But we should pay them a loving respect. They’re the versions of us that never bloomed.
I ask you this:
If you could see your forgotten selves, frozen in some red, silent lake— Would you recognize them?
Would you thank them?
Would you grieve them?
Or would you look away, pretending you never needed them at all?
Can you name the pieces of you that survived?
I can only speak for myself when I say: Everything that my life becomes will be all my fault. For that and nothing more, I am eternally, painfully, blissfully, grateful.
With great personal aesthetic,
Alexandra Diana, The A List
P.s. I thought you might enjoy this collection of images that inspired me. Xx
Superb read, very poignant
you summed up my nostalgia perfectly 🥹