All The Women I Could Have Been

Hey,

You can want to be the woman – who moved cities, who stayed close to home, who had children early, who never had them, who became real, who became free, who chose art, stability, power, love, solitude, everything.

And still, you only get to wake up inside one life at a time. 
And that’s what #Edition68 is about.

Sylvia Plath’s fig tree analogy names the fear that choosing one future means watching all the others fall. And it’s even more terrifying because it isn’t just about a lack of choice. It is about too much of it.

Inside this Edition:
👉 For The Lives We Don’t Get To Live…
🥗 What she’s watching, reading, doing
📰 5 headlines worth her time
✨ Her Spotlight
🤍 Note to Her

How do you live one life without feeling haunted by all the others?

In The Bell Jar, Esther looks at her life like a tree full of figs, each one a possible future. She wants all of them, but choosing one means losing the rest. So she waits. And while she waits, the figs begin to rot. And, this feels painfully modern now.

Now the fig tree is not just in your imagination. It is in your browser tabs, saved reels, LinkedIn feed, Instagram posts. The founder announcement, wedding photos, solo trip, the new PhD around. Overall, the woman online, living a life that looks suspiciously like the one you almost chose.

You don’t just imagine the figs anymore.
You watch other women eating them.

And for women, choice has never been simple. We are sold possibilities, then punished for what possibilities cost. Career or family. Ambition or acceptance. Stability or freedom. Marriage or selfhood. Body clock or career clock. Money or meaning. Being good or being free.

Every path asks a woman to give up another socially approved version of herself.
And, that is where possibility grief begins.
It is the quiet mourning of the lives you did not live.
Every choice is also a little funeral, even when it is the right one.

Psychologists often talk about choice overload: the way too many options can make choosing harder, not easier. But this is, even, deeper than indecision. This is identity overload. There are too many women inside one woman’s imagination, and she is trying not to disappoint any of them.

But… adulthood is not learning how to become every version of yourself. It is learning how to grieve the lives you didn’t choose without abandoning the one you did.

Not every dream has to become a destiny. Some dreams can remain proof that you were alive enough to want widely. You can want everything and still choose one thing. You can miss a life and still love the one you are building. The life you choose still counts, even if it is not every kind of life you would’ve wanted.

A chosen life is not a failed life.
It is just the one you are here to make real.

💬 Ideas to tune into when the world’s too loud.

🎬 Watch: Dirt! The Movie
This is about soil, decay, growth, and the strange miracle of everything that begins underground. Watch it, if you're thinking about roots: the lives that did not grow, the ones that did, and the one still asking you to tend to it.
📖 Read: Promise Me Sunshine by Cara Bastone
A woman grieving her best friend and trying to complete a list of things that might help her feel alive again. Healing is not always a grand reinvention. Sometimes it is one small proof at a time that life can still hold you.
🛏️ Explore: Rachel Moss / The Internet Is Our Bedroom
Rachel Moss writes about girlhood, bedroom culture, the internet, and the strange private worlds where girls become themselves – browser tabs, posters, playlists, and online corners no one else fully understood.

🌍 5 stories shaping the week for women everywhere.

💸 Retirement Is Another Place Where The Gender Pay Gap Follows Women: Women over 62 already receive about $5,254 less per year in Social Security than men on average, and any future benefit cuts could deepen that gap.
🤖 AI Is Still Getting Women Wrong: UN Women warned that AI systems are repeating old gender stereotypes, with one study finding gender bias in 44% of 133 AI systems reviewed.
🩺 Menopause Care Is Entering Policy: More than half of U.S. states have introduced or passed menopause-related bills in the past two years, covering insurance, medical education, and workplace support.
💰 Women Are Inheriting Wealth, But Not Always Confidence: By 2030, women are expected to receive nearly $34 trillion in assets, but many still feel unsure about investing and long-term financial planning.
📚 Joyce Carol Oates On A Life In Words: At 88, Joyce Carol Oates is still writing, watching, grieving, loving, and thinking sharply about the world around her. For an edition about all the women one life can hold, her career is a reminder that one chosen path can still contain many versions of a woman.

Found her voice. Loved her clarity. Needed you to see her.

@thelilyholmes speaks to women building businesses, brands, and lives that do not always make sense from the outside.

Her work sits in the space between self-trust, reinvention, failure, momentum, and the strange courage it takes to keep choosing your own path. When we talk about all the lives we don’t get to live, she feels like a reminder that maybe the life you chose is not wrong. Maybe it just needs more devotion before it becomes a proof of YOU.

Her Weekly Download has two drops every week, Tuesdays and Fridays – plus a Sunday news special for the women-first stories worth knowing.

✨P.S.  Send this to her who needs to be herself a little more because the best kind of wisdom goes from a woman to a woman 💚