our sister lives
july 23 | weekly warm-up
Reflect on choices you’ve made, dreams you’ve deferred, and paths you didn’t take. Write about one of the paths that you didn’t pursue that you feel some level of grief or loss about. It could be a career path, a relationship, a life decision, etc.
Choose whatever approach you like to write about this. For example: - You could write a letter to the version of yourself that is living the sister life or write a letter from her to your current, actual self.
- You could freestyle write to describe how the grief feels, including what you’ve lost and what you’ve gained by making the choices you have, and taking the paths you’ve chosen.
- You can explore different ways of redefining hope based on your current reality. How can you still have what you think you’ve lost?
“I'll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don't choose. We'll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us. There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore.” ― Cheryl Strayed
As I heal, I think of my younger self and my heart breaks over how I used to betray her and allow her to be mistreated. In this way, grief is an echo of shame, a series of intrusive memories that haunt me as I grieve who I could have been. I grieve those missed opportunities to direct my path, to say yes to what felt right, and no to what felt wrong. The sister life that haunts me is the one where I trusted my intuition, and believed that my voice mattered. The one where I didn’t shrink and apologize for taking up space.
In my sister life, when my college boyfriend tried to break up with me freshman year to see other girls; I happily let him go, instead of channeling Dreamgirls and basically declaring — “I’m not going! You’re gonna love me!” — like I did in reality. In my sister life, when another boyfriend mocked my growing interest in mental health awareness; I discerningly let him go, instead of holding tighter, believing that I could change him. In my sister life, when I realized that the father of my children and I had different values; I faced it, instead of trying to deny mine to align with his. These red flags burn in my memory, consuming time, space, and energy. Time I can’t get back, space I didn’t take up, and energy I gave to the wrong things.
The time it took me to love and respect myself makes me romanticize what life would have been like if I’d found myself sooner. What could have been different if I’d heeded the red flags, and trusted the gut feelings. As I heal, I know that we can’t find ourselves if we never get lost. We learn how to trust our intuition by feeling the stinging regret of not trusting it. These younger versions of me were learning that when you burn a bridge, you can find wisdom in the smoke. Your resilience grows when you forgive yourself for what you didn’t know.
Grief is a part of personal growth and creative expansion that is often unexpected. You make choices, you learn, you grow, and you release the versions of you that could have made different choices. You release the paths that you didn’t take. And this release triggers feelings of grief and loss. But we can turn this around by finding wisdom in the smoke. We can ask ourselves, “What happens to a dream deferred?” and consider what parts of those unlived lives do we still have access to through the choices we make today?