In this reflection we grieve what might have been.
You cannot point to a loss. No one died. Nothing ended. But something feels missing anyway. A heaviness that does not have a name.
You are mourning something that never happened. The childhood that should have been different. The parent who should have shown up. The relationship that could have worked if. The career you almost had. The person you might have become if things had gone another way.
This kind of grief is called ambiguous loss. It is real grief without a clear object. Society does not know how to hold it because there is no funeral, no milestone, no event that says: now you may grieve.
But the loss is still there. You carry it in the gap between what you expected and what you got. In the fantasy you had to give up. In the door that closed so quietly no one else noticed.
Some people feel ashamed of this grief. How can you mourn something you never had? But the psyche does not distinguish between losing something and never getting it in the first place. Both register as absence. Both require mourning.
The unlived life can haunt you if you do not let yourself feel its weight. It shows up as restlessness, as unexplained sadness, as the vague sense that you are homesick for a place you have never been.
Grief is not only for what you lost. It is also for what you were promised and did not receive. For what you deserved and did not get. For the imagined future that will never arrive.
You can grieve and move forward at the same time. In fact, you probably have to grieve in order to move forward. Otherwise you stay attached to the ghost of what should have been, unable to fully live what is.
Let yourself feel the loss. Even if it does not make sense. Even if no one else understands.
It was real to you. That is enough.