Ghost Ships
Many (many!!!) years ago, just months before graduating college, it hit me:
I had no idea what came next.
College has a way of holding you in something soft and contained—and I could feel that cocoon thinning.
So I looked around. I talked to people. I thought about my options.
My friends had plans: graduate school, clear next steps—another cocoon.
It sounded good to me. I applied to law schools and social work programs and let the universe decide.
The universe had opinions. Law school it was.
After some travel and a move to Los Angeles, I found myself on a path that, at the time, made perfect sense.
Until it didn’t.
A few years later, nearing graduation, I was right back there:
What now?
I didn’t want the obvious path.
But I didn’t have a clear alternative either.
Then one day, walking down a hallway, I saw a small index card pinned to a bulletin board: a job at a newly formed office handling death penalty appeals.
I knew almost nothing about criminal appeals or the death penalty.
But something in me leaned toward it.
I applied. I got the job. A new path began.
And that’s how it went—again and again.
At every crossroads—jobs, moves, marriage, children—I made the best decision I could with what I knew at the time.
Often uncertain.
Often hoping.
More guesswork than clarity.
And if I’m honest, what stayed with me wasn’t just the pressure of deciding.
It was everything the decision ruled out.
The paths I didn’t take.
The lives I didn’t live.
Years later, I found language for that feeling in Cheryl Strayed’s Dear Sugar essay, The Ghost Ship That Did Not Carry Us.
She calls those unlived lives “ghost ships.”
The roads not taken.
The selves we didn’t become.
In her view, every choice closes off other lives—and part of being human is learning to make peace with that.
It was a beautiful sentiment but it felt off to me.
Those feelings of loss and regret weren’t something to get rid of.
They were something to listen to.
That quiet what if that keeps showing up-
it’s not noise.
It’s information.
A signal that something in you is asking for more.
More expression.
More alignment.
More truth.
Ghost ships don’t pull you backward.
They point to what’s still possible.
There’s something I’ve been quietly building behind the scenes.
A small, private experience for people standing at one of these crossroads—where something no longer fits, but what comes next isn’t fully visible yet.
A space to listen more closely to those “ghost ships”… and to discover what they might be asking of you now.
I’ll be sharing more in the coming weeks.
For now, if you feel that stirring—the sense that there may be more than one story available to you—you can keep an eye out.
There will only be a few spots available.