When I went to pharmacy school, I had a fairly clear idea of what I wanted to do after I graduated. I grew up in a small town, and my parents had their eye on the local pharmacy. I could see a version of my future in which I came home, became the local pharmacist, and perhaps eventually owned the store.

I could see that life. I knew the community. I understood the role. There was something appealing about being the pharmacist who knew generations of families, who understood the history behind the prescription, and who was part of the fabric of a place.

That isn't the life I ended up living.

My career moved in other directions. I became interested in mental health and worked in hospitals. Education became increasingly important to me. Leadership followed. Somewhere along the way I went back to school and completed a PhD in the middle of my career. Research, writing and coaching have since become parts of my work too.

Written that way, it sounds remarkably coherent.

Professional biographies tend to do that. They take a collection of decisions, opportunities, accidents, relationships and changes of mind and arrange them into a story in which one thing seems naturally to have led to the next. Looking backward, the path can appear almost inevitable.

Living it rarely feels that way.

Sheryl Sandberg famously suggested in Lean In that we think about careers as jungle gyms rather than ladders. I have always liked that metaphor, perhaps because I am a parent and have spent more hours than I care to count standing beside actual jungle gyms.

A ladder gives us one direction. A jungle gym gives us many. We can move sideways, climb, change direction, pause for a while, or reach for something we hadn't noticed at the start.

My own career has looked much more like a jungle gym.

But lately I have been thinking about another part of the metaphor. Every time we reach for one bar, we pass up others. Every direction we choose leaves other directions unexplored.

And with them, other versions of ourselves.

Psychologists Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius introduced the idea of “possible selves” decades ago: the people we imagine we might become, would like to become, or sometimes fear becoming. These possible selves influence what we pursue and how we understand ourselves now. They are also shaped by the worlds around us. We learn what kinds of futures are imaginable partly from what we see, what is available to us, and what other people help us see in ourselves.

I can still imagine a version of me behind the counter of that small-town pharmacy. There are other versions too. The clinician I might have remained. The opportunities I considered and didn't pursue. The jobs I almost took. The places I might have lived.

I don't think about these possibilities with regret. Quite the opposite. I like knowing that my life could have unfolded in many different ways.

The local pharmacist still tells me something about myself. Community mattered to her. Relationships mattered. Being useful mattered. Those things still matter to me. They simply found expression in a life I couldn't have imagined when I first started pharmacy school.

Perhaps that is what happens with some of our possible selves. We don't exactly leave them behind. We carry pieces of them forward.

Of course, the jungle gym isn't infinitely open. We like stories in which people simply choose the lives they want, but the futures available to us are shaped by family, institutions, resources, geography, timing, opportunity and the people around us. Some possibilities become visible because someone else points them out. Others may never become visible at all.

We are climbing within a structure.

But enormous possibility still exists within it.

I think that matters, particularly in the middle of a career. By then, it can be easy to look backward and convince ourselves that the path makes sense because it was somehow always leading here. It wasn't. We made choices. Things happened. People intervened. Opportunities appeared. We changed.

And we can change direction again.

Maybe that is why I still like the jungle gym.

There isn't one correct route across it.

The pharmacist I once imagined becoming never quite existed, but she is still part of my story. I can see pieces of her in the work I chose, the relationships I value and the way I understand what it means to have a useful life.

My career didn't turn out the way I imagined it would.

I am very glad it didn't.

And I am also glad I once imagined it differently.

A question to sit with

Who is one person you once imagined becoming, and what part of them is still with you?