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What a Broken Marriage Taught Me About Perfect Foreshadowing
Published 3 months ago • 2 min read
December 20, 2024
For years, my (now ex) husband and I made vision boards together. If you aren’t familiar with the concept, a vision board is essentially a collage of images, words, and symbols that represent your goals, dreams, and aspirations. It’s a way to manifest the life you want by visualizing it every day.
Our boards were filled with shared dreams—vacations we wanted to take, milestones we wanted to reach, and the kind of life we imagined for ourselves. Every so often, we’d sit down together, leaf through magazines, and glue our dreams onto poster boards. It was a small but meaningful ritual, a way of aligning our hopes and staying connected as partners.
But here’s the twist: a few months before I discovered my husband’s affair, I threw all our vision boards away. We were moving, and in the chaos of packing, I impulsively decided to toss them. At the time, I didn’t think much of it. We’d just make more, I thought. Yet now, with hindsight, I can’t help but wonder if that act held a deeper meaning.
Was it a subconscious acknowledgment that the visions we’d crafted together no longer aligned with reality? Was it intuition guiding my actions, a quiet knowing that something was already broken? Or was it simply a coincidence, given weight only by the events that followed?
Whatever it was, I can’t ignore how symbolic it feels. Soon after the boards were gone, I learned about the affair. And now, I’m divorced. Those discarded vision boards feel like a prelude to the end of that chapter in my life.
What does any of this have to do with writing?
In writing, we call moments like this foreshadowing—a technique where hints or clues suggest events that will unfold later in the story. It’s a powerful tool that adds layers of meaning and builds anticipation for readers.
Foreshadowing can be subtle, like a character casually mentioning a storm on the horizon before the narrative plunges into chaos. Or it can be more overt, like an item falling to the floor and shattering – symbolizing fractured relationships. When done well, it creates a sense of cohesion in a story, making readers feel like everything is connected and inevitable.
My vision board story feels like real-life foreshadowing. The act of throwing away those boards wasn’t just a practical decision during a move; it became a symbolic gesture that mirrored the crumbling of shared dreams and the unraveling of my marriage. In storytelling, moments like this resonate because they feel truthful—they’re rooted in actions and details that carry emotional weight.
The vision board I made a few weeks ago for my new life.
Life has a way of offering us stories within stories, moments that feel ordinary until time reframes them with new meaning. As writers, we can draw inspiration from these experiences to craft narratives that feel authentic and profound.
So, the next time you’re plotting your story, think about the small moments that could act as foreshadowing. What gestures, symbols, or decisions might take on new significance as the story unfolds? And if life ever feels a little too on-the-nose with its symbolism, remember: sometimes truth really is stranger (and maybe better) than fiction.
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