Sometimes the ending isn't the ending you imagined. Sometimes it's the beginning of something you never knew you needed.
the picture i carried
There was a time when I thought I knew what my life was going to look like.
Not every detail, of course. But I had a picture. A sense of where I was headed, who would be beside me, and what the years ahead were supposed to hold.
And when you've lived inside that picture for a long time, you don't always realize how much of yourself you've invested in it.
You build a life around it. You make decisions because of it. You imagine futures that haven't happened yet, until those futures begin to feel almost like memories.
And then, sometimes, the picture changes.
Not gradually. Not in some beautifully orchestrated way that gives you time to prepare. Sometimes the future you thought you were moving toward simply stops being the future that's available to you.
grieving a future that never happened
For a while, it's difficult not to measure everything against what was supposed to happen.
I think that's one of the quieter forms of grief. Not just missing a person or a place or a particular chapter of your life, but missing the years you thought were still waiting for you.
The life you almost lived.
And yet, here I am.
Still making music. Still discovering things about myself. Still having moments that surprise me. Still finding reasons to laugh, to want, to look forward to tomorrow.
There are things about my life today that I never would have predicted. Some arrived through choices I made. Others arrived through circumstances I never would have chosen.
But they are all part of my life now.
the life that's actually mine
And lately, I've been thinking about how unfair it would be to spend the rest of that life treating it as a lesser version of something else.
As though the only life worthy of loving was the one that followed the original plan.
That's where epilogue II – a life worth loving came from.
Not from a moment when everything suddenly made sense. Not from reaching some perfect state of acceptance where the past stopped mattering.
It came from recognizing that I don't have to wait for my life to resemble the one I imagined before I can appreciate the one I have.
There's a line in the song that says:
My life doesn’t have to be
the life I imagined
for it to be
a life worth loving.
Those words mean something different to me than they might have a year ago.
not consolation. permission.
I don't hear them as consolation.
I hear them as permission.
Permission to stop comparing every new possibility to an old expectation. Permission to enjoy something without wondering whether it makes up for what was lost. Permission to want a beautiful future without needing to know exactly what it looks like.
And maybe most importantly, permission to be happy without first proving how much I've survived.
an epilogue without an ending
I called this song an epilogue because it closes the album. But the more I listen to it, the less it feels like an ending.
An epilogue usually tells us what happened after the story was over.
This one doesn't.
I don't know what happens next. I don't know who I'll meet, what I'll create, where life will take me, or what I'll believe about all of this a year from now.
And for perhaps the first time in a very long time, I don't feel the need to have those answers.
The story isn't over.
I'm still living it.
And it's a life worth loving.
the lives we almost lived. the life we're still living.
This Sunday, November 1, I'm releasing a new album called the lives we almost lived / the life we're still living.
And in many ways, epilogue II – a life worth loving is the reason this album exists.
The songs weren't all written with a single destination in mind. They came from different moments, different experiences, and sometimes very different versions of myself. Some look backward at what might have been. Others sit with the uncertainty of what is. And some begin to imagine what could still be.
As I brought them together, I started recognizing something I hadn't necessarily understood while I was writing them.
I wasn't just documenting the things that had happened to me.
I was discovering how I wanted to live with them.
That's what connects these songs for me. Not a neat progression from sadness to happiness, or a story in which everything broken eventually gets repaired. Life doesn't work that way, and I don't want my music to pretend that it does.
It's about recognizing that the lives we almost lived still belong to our stories, even when they aren't the lives we're living now.
And that the life we're still living deserves just as much attention, curiosity, and love.
The album begins with after the silence, a song that asks what happens when the noise finally stops and we're left with ourselves.
It ends with epilogue II – a life worth loving.
Not because I've found all the answers.
But because I've stopped believing I need them before I can begin enjoying my life.
On Sunday, I'll be sharing the whole journey. And while every song comes from something deeply personal, I hope there's room in it for listeners to recognize pieces of their own stories, too.
