Real Talk: You Can’t Have It All

At some point in our late twenties or early thirties, right around when you stop bouncing back from hangovers and start wondering if dental insurance is a form of happiness, this nagging idea begins to creep in: “Why don’t I have more?” More success. More love. More creativity. More time. More of everything.

And if you’re a writer, God help you. You don’t just want it all; you feel like you should already have it. The bookshelves should be filled with your name. The emails from agents and publishers should be flooding in. And your Twitter feed? It should be a shrine of admiration, not a desert of memes and self-doubt.

But here’s the thing I’ve learned, painfully, slowly, and with more cups of coffee than I care to count: you can’t have it all. You’re not supposed to. And that truth? It’s not a failure. It’s freedom.

There was a time I believed I’d write my breakout novel by 25, be featured in some literary journal with a moody black-and-white photo of me at a typewriter, and spend my evenings sipping whiskey in Paris cafés, brooding over edits while some jazz saxophonist played my pain in B minor.

But in reality? I sell insurance by day, write horror stories by night, and get distracted by women who say one thing but mean another. Sometimes I was that person. (Let’s not pretend only one side gets to hold the mirror.) But each chapter in that messy, imperfect life taught me something the fantasy never could.

Every decision has a cost.

Time spent writing is time not spent socializing. Time spent chasing literary greatness is time not spent relaxing, or building something stable, or being present with someone who might actually matter. Want to be a prolific writer? Trade your weekends. Want deep love? Trade the solitude you swore you needed. Want to be free? Trade your comfort.

Trade, trade, trade. It never ends. But when you finally accept that every “yes” costs you a dozen “no’s,” something beautiful happens: you start choosing better.

They’ll tell you to aim for balance. Don’t listen. You can’t juggle everything without dropping something, and sometimes what you drop is yourself. I used to beat myself up for not writing enough. For not publishing faster. For not being more poetic, more productive, more profound. But that’s just another form of chasing everything, trying to be all the Gabriels at once. The poet, the lover, the businessman, the friend, the wounded soul, the healed man.

You can’t.

But you can be the right one for the moment you’re living.

If I’ve learned anything from these years of bleeding on paper, it’s that writing doesn’t give you everything. It takes from you. It steals your sleep, your relationships, your illusions. But what it gives back is more honest: a version of yourself you didn’t know was hiding. That’s why my memoirs matter, not because I think the world needs more self-reflection, but because I do. Because somewhere between the page and the past, I find pieces of myself I lost along the way.

I’m forty years old now. That number used to sound like a deadline. Now it feels like a doorway. I may never be the literary genius I once imagined, but I’m something better: someone who sees people, hears stories, writes from the gut. Someone who knows what it costs to chase the dream, and still shows up anyway.

So no, you can’t have it all.

But maybe, if you’re lucky, and if you give a damn about the right things, you can have enough. And maybe that’s what all the best stories are made of anyway.