The grief of unrealised potential

Imagine that you're walking along the side of a soccer field, on your way to work, to the shop, or just having a stroll, and the kids playing on the field accidentally kick the ball your way. Being the kind person you are, you move to kick it back. Just as you're about to, a thought flashes through your mind: your knee. The old injury. The one that ended everything. You hesitate for a second, wondering if you should even risk it.

But you do it anyway. And to your surprise, your kick is so swift and smooth that the ball flies past the kids and nearly into the goalpost. The kids cheer. A couple of them shout, "Nice one!" One asks, "Do you play?" You smile, shake your head, and walk on.

But as you continue walking, something has shifted. That moment replays in your mind. The clean contact, the perfect arc, the muscle memory that never left. Your body still knows. After all these years, it still remembers.

You think about who you used to be. The amateur league games, the practices, the dreams of going pro. You were good. Really good. Scouts had watched you play. There were conversations, possibilities, a path forward that felt real. And then one bad tackle, one torn ligament, one diagnosis that changed everything. "You could play again," the doctor said, "but not at that level. Not competitively."

So you stopped. You told yourself it was practical, realistic. If you couldn't go pro, what was the point? You moved on. Got a job, built a different life, buried that version of yourself who lived and breathed the game.

That version of you existed in potential. He was real, he was close, he was almost there. And then he was gone. Not because you weren't talented enough. Not because you didn't work hard enough. But because of one moment, one injury, one door that slammed shut before you could walk through it.

The grief isn't just about soccer. It's about the life you were supposed to live, the person you were meant to become. And that same grief shows up in places you'd never expect.

Picture this: You're on a long-haul flight, and you end up sitting next to someone who just clicks. The conversation flows effortlessly. You have the same sense of humor, similar views on life. There's chemistry. You both feel it. You're both single. Hours pass like minutes.

Then the plane lands. You gather your things, shuffle down the aisle together, make small talk about baggage claim. You both pause at the terminal. There's a moment, that moment, where one of you could say something. You take the chance. You tell her how you feel, ask for her number, and she agrees. She gives it to you with a smile.

You spend the next few days talking over the phone, texting throughout the day. It feels like the start of something new, something wonderful. You let yourself hope. You let yourself imagine where this might go.

And then suddenly, your messages stop going through. You call. It doesn't ring. You check again, thinking it's a technical glitch. But deep down, you already know. You've been blocked.

The first feeling is shock. Your brain can't reconcile it. Everything was fine. Better than fine. The last message you sent was light, easy, the kind of thing that would normally get a quick reply with a laugh. There was no argument, no warning sign, no moment where things shifted. One moment you're building something, the next moment it's just gone.

Then comes the confusion. You replay every conversation, every text, searching for the moment it went wrong. But there isn't one. Or maybe there is, and you just can't see it. You wonder if you said something, missed something, moved too fast or too slow. The not-knowing eats at you.

But underneath all of that, there's a deeper ache. It's not just about her. It's about what could have been. You weren't just texting someone, you were imagining a future. Small things at first: a first date, meeting for coffee, seeing her smile in person again. But also bigger things. The way she might fit into your life. What it would feel like to introduce her to your friends. Whether she'd laugh at the same movies you do. All those tiny possibilities you let yourself entertain.

And now? All of it, unrealized. Not because it couldn't have worked. Not because you tried and failed. But because you never got the chance to find out. The relationship that might have been beautiful, meaningful, transformative, will now exist only as a ghost. A "what if" that haunts you precisely because you'll never have an answer.

What connects these moments is the grief of "what could have been", grief over a version of you or your life that never materialized, but whose shape you can still feel. The grief of unrealized potential is a unique, quiet kind of mourning.

"The grief of unrealized potential is a unique, quiet kind of mourning."

You are not losing a person or a tangible thing. You're losing a version of yourself that never came to be. It's the gap between who you are and who you feel you "should" have been, or could have been, if only things had gone differently. It's often called "disenfranchised grief" because society doesn't always recognize it as legitimate. There's no funeral, no condolences, no socially acceptable way to mourn. Yet it can feel just as heavy as any other loss.

When something ends, you can process it. When something never begins, you're left with imagination.

Think back to the soccer field. If your knee had never been injured, if you'd played professionally even for just a few matches, maybe you would have realized there's more to being a professional soccer player than the glitz and glamour. Maybe you would have discovered that the world of professional sports is harder than the media makes it seem. The constant scrutiny. The strategies you don't agree with. Being assigned the wrong position on the field. The disappointment of being benched. The hate that follows when you miss a penalty kick.

Even if your career had been short-lived, even if you'd decided professional soccer wasn't for you, you would have still made memories. You would have still explored the paths that were in front of you. You would have known, instead of spending the rest of your life wondering.

But you never got that chance. So instead of memories (messy, complicated, real memories) you're left with a perfect fantasy. A career that never disappointed you because it never existed. A version of yourself who succeeded because he never had the chance to fail.

The same is true for the girl on the plane. If you'd gone on that first date, maybe the chemistry wouldn't have translated from text to real life. Maybe the conversation would have felt forced over coffee. Maybe you would have discovered incompatibilities, different life goals, deal breakers that weren't obvious in those first few days. Maybe it would have lasted a few weeks or months before naturally running its course.

If it had ended after dating for six months, you'd have real memories (good and bad). You'd know what didn't work. You'd have seen her flaws, experienced the incompatibilities, witnessed the slow unraveling. There would be a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. You could process it, learn from it, eventually move on.

But when something ends before it truly begins? You have nothing concrete to hold onto. No real relationship to mourn, no clear reason it failed. Just a handful of conversations, a few good moments, and an ocean of possibility that will never be explored. Your mind fills that blank space with the best possible version, the version where everything worked out perfectly.

The torture of imagination.

Actual loss is painful, but it's finite. You grieve what you had. With unrealized potential, you're grieving what you might have had, and your imagination is cruelly generous. It paints the most beautiful picture: the relationship that would have been effortless, the career that would have fulfilled you, the life that would have felt right.

You can't disprove any of it. There's no evidence that it wouldn't have been amazing. So the fantasy stays perfect, untouchable, taunting you with its purity.

The Bargaining and Self-Loathing

The bargaining makes everything worse. People who look inward when things don't pan out immediately start the "if only" loop.

I should have stretched more. I should have cleaned my spikes more diligently. Maybe if I'd been more disciplined, the injury would never have happened. Or deeper: Maybe I'm not talented enough. If only I'd been faster, stronger, taller.

With the girl, it's the same spiral. What if I'd waited one more day before texting? What if I'd been funnier, less available? What did I say wrong? You replay every conversation, searching for the moment you ruined it.

But here's the cruelty: there might not have been a mistake. The injury was an accident. She might have blocked you for reasons that have nothing to do with you. But your brain can't accept that. It needs someone to blame. And when there's no clear villain, you make yourself the villain.

The Anger

The bargaining hardens into anger. At yourself: How could I have been so careless? At the player who tackled you. At the doctor who couldn't fix you. At the universe that dangled a dream and snatched it away.

With the girl, you're angry at her for disappearing, at yourself for caring about someone you barely knew, at how easily people can erase each other.

But underneath the anger is something more painful: helplessness. You had no control. The injury happened. She blocked you. No amount of bargaining or anger can change what's already gone.

The Eventual Acceptance (Or Lack Thereof)

Some people reach acceptance. They make peace with the unrealized potential, let the ghost go, move forward.

But for others, acceptance never quite arrives. The "what if" lingers. Years later, you still think about the soccer career that almost was, the girl on the plane. The grief doesn't stay sharp, but it doesn't fully disappear. It becomes a quiet ache, a reminder of paths you didn't get to walk.

And maybe that's okay. Maybe some losses aren't meant to be neatly resolved. Maybe some versions of yourself are meant to haunt you, not as punishment, but as proof that you were capable of wanting something deeply. That you were brave enough to imagine a different life, even if you never got to live it.

Why Closure Won't Save You

When I speak of this to people, the first thing they point out is the lack of closure. This is especially apparent in sudden breakups and cliff-edge endings, where things ended abruptly without warning or explanation.

The instinct is to seek answers. To understand why. You want to dissect the injury, analyze every factor that led to it, as if understanding the mechanics could somehow undo the damage. Or you want to reach out to her, to ask what happened, what you did wrong, why she disappeared. You convince yourself that if you just knew, you could finally move on.

But here's the hard truth: trying to reason through the injury or reaching out for answers won't actually help you. Closure as a construct is useful when there was a beginning, a middle, and an end. But chasing closure when there was no real beginning is futile. You're trying to close a door that never fully opened.

The Bad Ways We Cope

In the absence of real closure, we create our own (usually destructive) coping mechanisms:

Obsessive replaying. You watch the moment of the injury in your mind on repeat, frame by frame, searching for the exact second it went wrong. You reread every text message with her, analyzing tone, timing, word choice. If only I'd said this instead. If only I'd waited. If only I'd been different. The replaying becomes a ritual, a way to maintain connection with something that's already gone.

Creating narratives. Your brain hates ambiguity, so it invents stories to fill the void. She met someone else. She never really liked me. I came on too strong. I wasn't interesting enough. With the injury: I should have been more careful. I wasn't disciplined enough. I didn't want it badly enough. These narratives might not be true, but they give you something to hold onto. A reason, even if it's self-punishing, feels better than no reason at all.

Shutting down. Some people go the opposite direction. They decide the solution is to never hope again. Never get excited about a connection. Never imagine a future. If you don't let yourself want things, you can't be hurt when they don't happen. The problem is, you also can't experience joy, anticipation, or genuine connection. You trade vulnerability for safety, and end up with neither.

Reaching out. The urge to message her, to demand an explanation, to ask what went wrong. You draft the text a hundred times. I just want to understand. Can you at least tell me why? But even if she responds (she probably won't), what answer could she give that would actually satisfy you? "It just wasn't right"? "I wasn't ready"? "I met someone else"? None of these will undo the grief. They'll just give you new things to obsess over.

Comparing yourself to others. You start measuring yourself against imagined competitors. Was there someone better? Funnier? More attractive? More successful? You convince yourself that if you'd just been more (fill in the blank), things would have turned out differently. This is self-torture disguised as self-improvement.

None of these strategies actually heal the wound. They just keep it open, fresh, constantly picked at. The grief of unrealized potential doesn't respond to answers because it's not really about answers. It's about sitting with the unbearable reality that some things will never have resolution.

"What could have been" vs "What would have been"

The first step toward processing this grief is understanding the duality of the situation: what you feel as "what could have been" is not, and will never be, equivalent to "what would have been." You are a victim of your own optimism, which forces you to paint the unknown parts between two known points with the colors of your choosing, those that please you most.

You most certainly cannot force yourself to stop caring. You cannot will the "what if" out of your mind. It simply isn't possible. But what you can do is stop feeding it.

Every time you think of the lost potential, complete the thought, follow it through to the end and understand it for what it is. It is not an absolute truth, but rather a prediction of the future, a prediction that you significantly favored and hence will most often be significantly skewed with respect to reality.

Have I dissected this feeling or grief completely? No, I have not. I feel I am not knowledgeable enough to advice on how to process grief more than I have already done.

Have I dissected this grief completely? No. I don't claim to have all the answers. I'm not a therapist, not a grief counselor, just someone who's felt this particular ache and tried to make sense of it.

What I do know is this: the grief of unrealized potential is real, even if the thing you're grieving never was. The soccer career that ended before it began. The relationship that existed only in possibility. The version of yourself you'll never get to meet. These losses matter, even if no one else sees them.

You'll think about the girl on the plane sometimes. You'll wonder. Years from now, you might kick a soccer ball and feel that old spark, that reminder of what your body once knew. The "what if" doesn't disappear completely. It just becomes quieter, less urgent, part of the background noise of a life full of other possibilities, other almosts, other versions of yourself worth chasing.

But there's a hidden beauty in this grief, something underappreciated and often ignored by people going through these emotions. And that is hope.

You hoped for a future with that person. You hoped for a career that few dare to chase. You let yourself imagine something better, something beautiful, something worth wanting. That capacity to hope, even when it led to disappointment, is not a weakness. It's proof of something vital in you.

"Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies." - The Shawshank Redemption

Hold onto that hope. Not the specific hope that you'll go back to being a soccer pro or get that girl back, but the deeper hope beneath it: that you're capable of ambition, of wanting to build something good, of opening yourself to connection. That willingness to be vulnerable, to imagine, to let yourself want things deeply—it's rarer than people think. And it's worth protecting.

The fantasy wasn't real. The future you imagined may never have existed. But your ability to hope? That's real. That's yours. And it will carry you to other possibilities, other almosts, other versions of yourself still waiting to be discovered.