We are well versed on the multiple stages of grief when we lose someone through whatever way- heartbreak or death or mental illness. But a rather strange new world opens up at the loss of something that you never had – perhaps an unrequited love who married someone else, a missed opportunity at a job you had been longing for, or the finality of infertility.

The entire experience is one of an unfinished story, and the mourning of not what once was but what one could be. Some say the question marks that linger around after losing out on what could have been has a certain potency. There are no limitations to the imagination of this rose tinted fantasy should we have been with such a person, got a certain coveted job, had a wonderful child.

With the passage of time, these inquiries becomes either a dull tingle or a sigh of relief, depending on what else happened along the way that could expose either what we lost back then meant that our life forever stayed a little afflicted or broken, or the loss actually gave way to a far more fulfilling destiny.

But lately, a current social media reel spoke to me when it said that maybe the doors and windows were shut to you because there was a storm outside. Maybe you were thrown into the sea because your enemies can’t swim. There is certainly a truthful beauty in acknowledging that whatever it was that we missed out in this life, was never meant for us, and whether we come to understand it in this current paradigm or beyond, we are always meant to be the better for it.