The Long Way Around (Part Three)
A life of taken roads, detours, luck, and the people who made all the difference
The Invisible Forks in the Road
The older I get, the more fascinated I become by the lives we almost live.
Not in a regretful way, exactly. More in a reflective way. When you’re young, life feels relatively straightforward. You imagine a destination somewhere out ahead of you and assume that if you work hard enough, stay focused enough, and maybe get a little lucky, you’ll eventually arrive there.
But when you look backward from sixty-one, life doesn’t resemble a straight road at all.
It looks like branching paths disappearing into fog.
Tiny decisions become enormous in hindsight. One conversation. One impulsive choice. One opportunity accepted or declined. A random move. A job. A hobby. A person entering your life at exactly the right time. Looking back now, I can see dozens of moments where things could have gone very differently.
When I was younger, for example, it was honestly a toss-up whether I was going to pursue wrestling or art, specifically superhero comics.
I loved drawing. I still do, really. Even now, upstairs in the house, I have a cache of art supplies quietly collecting dust. Pens. Paper. Sketchbooks. Materials waiting patiently for a version of me that never completely disappeared.
But when the call came that I’d been accepted to train for wrestling, the art got put on the shelf.
At the time, that felt permanent. One door closing while another opened. Looking back now, though, it’s strange to think how easily my life could have followed an entirely different creative path. I could very easily have spent the last thirty or forty years drawing comics instead of writing novels and running a publishing company.
That alternate version of my life doesn’t feel impossible to imagine. In some ways, it feels surprisingly close, like a neighboring timeline I occasionally catch glimpses of out of the corner of my eye.
There were other turning points too, though they didn’t necessarily feel important at the time.
Buying my first computer probably changed the direction of my life more than I understood back then. It came with word processing software, and suddenly writing became something different. More immediate. More accessible. More possible. It’s funny now to think that one purchase quietly shaped so much of the life that followed.
At the same time, I try not to romanticize these forks in the road too much. I’ve never really believed there’s only one “correct” life waiting for us somewhere.
A lot of people end up exactly where they’re suited to be. I know people who genuinely thrive climbing the corporate ladder. Others find deep satisfaction in steady, structured work and building stability for their families. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. It simply was never the life that fit me particularly well.
And if I’d chosen differently? If I’d stayed focused on art instead of wrestling? If I’d never bought that first computer? If I’d never started writing?
I don’t think the result would have been catastrophe.
But I do think there would have been a lingering sense of unfulfillment. Boredom, maybe. The feeling that some important part of myself had gone unused.
That’s probably what surprises me most at this stage of life.
Not that everything turned out exactly the way I planned, because it absolutely didn’t. The path itself was wildly unpredictable. There were setbacks, strange jobs, disappointments, lucky breaks, bad decisions, long detours, and opportunities I never could have anticipated.
But despite all of that, the broad shape of what I wanted as a teenager somehow survived.
Back then, I knew I wanted creativity in my life. I wanted storytelling. Art. Performance. I wanted to make things that entertained people and meant something to them.
And somehow, incredibly, I’ve actually gotten to do most of those things.
That alone still stuns me sometimes.
If you’d shown sixteen-year-old Mark the life I eventually ended up with — the books, the publishing company, the readers around the world, the wrestling, the creative freedom — he probably would’ve thought it sounded impossible.
What he never would have guessed was the route it would take to get there.
That’s the part nobody understands when they’re young. You can sometimes predict the dream itself, but you almost never predict the road that leads to it.
Maybe that’s why I’ve become gentler with myself as I’ve gotten older.
Not every abandoned dream is a tragedy. Sometimes the art supplies upstairs aren’t evidence of failure or lost opportunity. Sometimes they’re simply reminders that life is larger, stranger, and more layered than we expected it would be.
They’re proof that there were always multiple versions of us waiting quietly at the crossroads.