Many Lives Vol. 07 — WordsByEkta🌿

🌱 The Seed Series // Vol. 07

Many Lives

[SCENE: A stage. Sharp, hot lights against my face. The smell of dust and old velvet curtains. A script dissolves from my mind like ink bleeding into water. My hands hang awkwardly at my sides, unsure where to rest.]

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.

She wasn't daydreaming. She was already writing them. (Image via WordsByEkta🌿)

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.

"Life — practical, urgent, unromantic — led me elsewhere."

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.

"Writing doesn't need a stage. It lets you sit with your truth until it shapeshifts into something bigger than yourself."

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.

← Vol. 6: Overlooked Vol. 8: Warnings & Rules →

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✍️ Written by WordsByEkta🌿
🖋️ Emotional Storyteller | Writing what hearts never say aloud

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