I Wanted to Be an Actor. Life Had Other Plans — WordsByEkta🌿
Many Lives
I dreamed I was on a stage. The lights were sharp, making my skin prickle. I opened my mouth, but the first word caught in my throat. My breath came too fast, each inhale scraping. I had been given the role I used to long for as a child — the chance to slip into another life, even for a moment.
But standing there, I froze. And as the dream held me in its unflinching light, I realized: I had only ever wanted to live many lives. I had never learned how to perform them.
For years, I thought acting was the vessel that would carry me toward that dream. I imagined myself moving from role to role like stepping stones, collecting other people's joys and sorrows, letting them leave their marks on me.
I chased security, approval, the choices that looked sensible on paper. I sat in fluorescent-lit offices where the hum of the air conditioner was louder than my own thoughts. I measured my days in emails answered and deadlines met. I learned to trade the expansive hunger of childhood dreams for the smaller, safer satisfactions of stability.
And yet, something remained — quiet, persistent. I noticed strangers. I imagined their lives. A woman at a railway station with a worn bag and a toddler clinging to her — was she running toward someone, or away? A man on a park bench arguing into his phone — what words had been left unsaid before this moment? My mind never settled for surfaces. I wanted the why behind the what.
I thought it was daydreaming. But it was, in truth, the beginning of writing.
When life finally slowed — in a season where the noise fell away — all the words I'd buried rose to the surface. At first they spilled out raw, without form. Then I began shaping them. And slowly, they became stories.
On the page, I was living many lives after all. I wasn't performing characters; I was creating them. A man who couldn't forgive himself for something he didn't do. A young woman who left home and never looked back. A child who believed the moon was following her bus home. I held their grief, felt their hunger, let their joy spill into mine.
I've been thinking about what it means to grieve a dream you never actually lost. Because that's what happened, I think. The acting dream didn't leave me empty-handed. It left me with everything I actually needed — the hunger to inhabit other lives, the eye for detail, the compulsion to find the story underneath the story.
I just didn't recognise it as writing for a long time. Because writing didn't look like a dream. It looked like scribbling. Like a habit. Like something I did without thinking, without credit, without ever calling it by its name.
The stage I imagined as a child had spotlights and an audience. The stage I found was quieter — a blank page, a cursor blinking, a thought that wouldn't leave me alone until I put it somewhere. No applause. No velvet curtains. Just the strange, private satisfaction of finding the right word for something that had never had one before.
What I know now is that the child who wanted to act and the woman who writes were never two different people. They were the same person in two different seasons. Both of them needed the same thing: a way to say — I was here. I felt this. This mattered.
Acting would have let me say it through someone else's words. Writing lets me say it through my own. And maybe that was always the more honest version of the dream — not borrowed lines, but found ones. Not a character to disappear into, but a voice to finally inhabit fully.
The little girl who wanted to be an actor simply wanted to live many lives. The woman I am now writes them instead. Writing doesn't ask you to memorize someone else's lines. Even my quirks make sense now — replaying conversations in my head, reimagining outcomes, sorting memories like files in a cabinet only I understand. They weren't distractions. They were early signs.
The dream of acting didn't die. It changed form. Every writer needs to know where to find the thread.
I may never stand in the spotlight, but I will keep building worlds. I may never speak someone else's lines, but I will keep writing mine. And if I meet another version of that dream — on the page, in a story, in a life I haven't lived yet — I will have something new to offer.
A voice. A perspective. A truth.
✍️ Written by WordsByEkta🌿
🖋️ Emotional Storyteller | Writing what hearts never say aloud
💌 If you connected with my way of saying hard truths — often overlooked but deeply felt — explore one of my free letters:
wordsbyekta.gumroad.com
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