Could I Have Become a Singer?

On possibilities growing worn

Photo by Ray Kim on Unsplash

I am good at singing. And I love it.

It was an identity I had carried for as long as I could remember. For a brief time in middle school, I sang in a band, and now and then someone would ask me to sing at their wedding.

The memory that stays with me most clearly is from college, about fifteen years ago. I submitted a recording for a general education assignment. A few days later, my professor asked me to stay after class. He asked whether it was really my own voice on the recording — and then earnestly told me to consider singing as a career.

At the time, I thought he simply didn’t know how the world worked. I was an accounting major.

Somewhere along the way, the identity of being good at singing had slipped to the back of my life. Other names had begun to fill its place — mother of two, someone running a small business of her own, and, only recently, a name that had attached itself to me: someone who writes.

Now, being good at singing is little more than a small private talent that entertains my family in the car.

Sometimes I wonder: if I had become a singer, what would my life look like now?

What if I had grown up in a stable home with more loving, attentive parents? What if I had met someone who recognized my talent and helped me develop it? What if I had simply had the money to pursue what I loved?

If nothing else, what if I had been a little more driven, a little more willing to take risks? Could I have become a singer?

I cannot place the blame entirely on my parents, my circumstances, or myself. None of those answers would be completely honest. Reality is always more complicated than that.

Watching a possibility grow worn is watching certain parts of myself wear away with time — the parts that might once have carried me into another life.

It does not fit neatly within the word regret. I did not become a singer. Some of what brought me to this life was given to me; some of it I chose.

I have already accepted that there was nothing I could do about what was given to me. And I have acknowledged that the choices I made were the best the person I was then could make.

Even so, the word if remains. There is nothing left to regret, and yet it is still there.

It remains because possibility does not vanish all at once. It is more like light traveling farther and farther from its source, spreading thinner and thinner as it goes.

It still shines.

But as time passes, recognizing it takes a little more effort. And in the end, I will be the only one left who knows that this possibility once existed.

When I notice a gift in my child, something in me stirs at the possibility I see there. But a child does not yet understand what that light means. And in that possibility, I meet again the light I still carry within me.

The eye that recognizes possibility seems to form only after some of our own has begun to wear thin. Maybe the professor who heard my voice that day saw more than my possibility — maybe he also saw a light of his own, already beginning to dim. Was that why he gave such sincere advice to someone who was only one student among many?

Would that light have lasted longer if that possibility had taken the shape of success? Perhaps it would have burned brighter, reached further.

But no possibility can shine as brightly forever. Sooner or later, we all have to accept that its light will fade — without anyone to fully blame, any regret we can name with certainty, or any real way to stop it from disappearing.

In that ambiguity, the world leaves us no choice but to endure.

Accepting and enduring the fading is harder, and more painful, than shining ever was.

And ironically, that one remaining choice is what turns a life into a narrative.

A possibility, once realized, becomes an event. But the time spent enduring its fading becomes meaning.

The light has faded, but that does not erase the fact that it passed through me.

My story will probably end with me still carrying a few faded possibilities. I may never be a singer. Still, I believe my story will be beautiful.

Not because the light remained dazzling until the end, but because I know what it left in me as it passed through.

Written by Hana © 2026