The Phantom Prince

Somewhere in your mind’s eye, there is a version of your life that went exactly the way it was supposed to. A great childhood and a family life that met all your needs. The right career path from the outset. No injuries. The right romantic partner at the right time.

No significant mistakes. Loved and cherished by everyone around you from an early age. No one around you died. No major flaws and you always won at everything you set out to win. You never spiralled into negative emotions or addiction. You had no struggles.

You were born a prince, and the world treated you as such. The demons left you alone.

Nothing was taken from you, and everything was given to you.

You have never met this version of you.

But you grieve him without realising it.

He is the life you feel you were owed, and every disappointment or ambition you didn’t reach gets measured, quietly, against him.

He is the phantom prince.

What scarred you is the space between the life you got and the one you were certain you'd get.

You feel it as a fracture, as if time broke somewhere behind you and left you stranded on the wrong side. But where did it break? Nowhere.

Amputees report pain in limbs that are no longer there. The nerves keep firing into space.

You are doing the same thing with a life: grieving a shape that was never attached to anything.

Here is the part nobody says plainly.

Your life was never meant to go anywhere near exactly the way you wanted. This is not a tragedy. It is a fact. There was no correct version sitting in a drawer that the universe forgot to hand you. The belief that there was is a disease of the mind.

You didn’t lose the good timeline. There was no timeline. There was only what happened: your surrounding culture, the traits you inherited, the cause and effect of your decisions, happenstance, and the prince’s ghost you built afterwards to measure it against.

Years ago, I wrote that you heal the past by analysing it. Name the wounds. Extract the lessons so the past serves you instead of owning you. Psychologists speak about the same thing as if it were a cure-all.

It isn’t, and I was wrong.

You can dissect your history forever and still get nowhere. Although you are learning from your mistakes, you are still negotiating for a refund.

There is no one at the counter.

I have no one-size-fits-all solution for the sense that life went wrong. Only this: the belief that it was supposed to go right is what keeps you in an emotional cage, kneeling to a prince who was never born. A man with no mistakes behind him is not a luckier version of you.

He is no one.

A story where nothing goes wrong is not a story.

There was never a version of you that grew without making mistakes.

We are taught that God is watching. The angels want the best for us. That the universe is friendly and arranging things, quietly, in our favour.

It is a comforting story. It is also how grown women and men make silly choices and take life too lightly. You take the risk you shouldn’t, because some part of you believes it works out in the end. You eat the whole tub and skip the work because God loves you anyway.

That is entitlement dressed as faith.

The universe has no preference on whether you stay grounded or fall. Gravity does not care about who is falling. The belief that the universe does have a preference for you is a child’s narcissistic certainty that the world was arranged for him, carried unexamined.

Life is not a story moving toward a destination. It is a standoff between chaos and order. The order is the part you build and can name. Chaos is everything still waiting to challenge you.

The phantom life is the fantasy that the standoff was already decided in your favour before you were born. That the good version of life was promised, signed, and held in a trust for you.

But no one promised you anything.

The promise was the first thing your mother’s love taught you to expect, and the thing the world never agreed to honour.

The man who knows this stops waiting for the order he was owed and starts building the only order there is: the kind you make with your hands.

The prince is a fantasy.

The man who buries him is the only one who gets to live.