Journaling Prompts for Grieving Alternative Life Paths
At a certain point in adulthood, the realization sets in that by making one choice, you have definitively murdered hundreds of other potential lives you could have lived. The phantom pain of the career you didn't take, the city you didn't move to, or the person you didn't marry can haunt your current reality. This mourning for the 'ghost ships' of your life prevents you from fully committing to the ship you are actually steering. Journaling helps you acknowledge these ghosts. By mapping out the realities of those alternative paths, you dismantle the idealized fantasy and force yourself to reconcile with the concrete life you have built.
Journaling Prompts
Identify the specific 'ghost life' you are romanticizing today. What mundane, difficult, or entirely boring realities would undoubtedly exist in that alternative life?
Write down the exact, difficult parameters that forced you to make the choice you did. Acknowledge that you made the most logical decision possible with the resources you had at the time.
Are you using the fantasy of this alternative life to escape a solvable problem in your current one? What specific issue in your day-to-day reality are you actively avoiding?
List three profound joys, relationships, or skills you currently possess that would have been entirely erased had you chosen the other path.
Write a short eulogy for that specific alternative life. Grieve it completely, and then consciously commit all your energy to the reality you are currently standing in.