How do you let go of the person you were going to be?

The short answer: the person you were going to be was never a destination. They were a direction, and a direction can be kept long after the plan it came with has gone. What you are grieving is the plan. The direction is still yours.

This grief is real and it gets almost no acknowledgement, because the person being mourned never existed. There is no funeral for a life you did not live. People will tell you to be grateful for the one you have, which is good advice and no help at all.

Why it hurts the way it does

That imagined person did a lot of work for you. For years they were the answer to "what is all this for". Every dull Tuesday was in service of them. When they became impossible, through age or circumstance or a choice you made that could not be unmade, the Tuesdays did not just lose their meaning. They lost their direction.

So the feeling is not vanity. It is disorientation. You are walking and there is no longer a place you are walking towards.

Separate the plan from the point

Sit with the person you were going to be and ask what they had that you wanted. Not the job title. Not the house. Under those.

It is nearly always one of a small number of things: to be good at something that matters, to be known by people who matter, to have made something that outlasts you, to have been free. That is the direction. The plan was just one route to it, and plans fail all the time for reasons that have nothing to do with the point.

The point does not expire. It can be served by a smaller life, a later life, a sideways life, and it very often is.

What you are allowed to keep

More than you think. The skills you built towards them are yours. So is the taste you developed, and the people you met on the way, and the particular way you see things that only comes from having wanted something hard for a long time.

The one thing you cannot keep is the story in which it all adds up on schedule. That story was always a loan.

The strange relief

People who finally put the imagined person down describe the same thing: that their actual life, which had been standing quietly behind the plan the whole time, turns out to have been waiting. Not as a consolation. As the thing itself.

It is smaller than what you pictured. It is also here, which the other one never was.

Where this is in the book

What Hands Are For is the last scene of chapter one. The man at the centre of the novel is not young and not lost; he has a competence built over years, and the book takes it entirely seriously. Then it asks him what it was for, and the answer is not the one he had been carrying. It is free to read.