“Life is never the same after a goodbye you never wanted to say.”
Grief is nothing like I once imagined it was.
I’ve felt the unbearable weight of grief before. It met me throughout different stages in my life: navigating friendship loss, chapters that ended without warning, and after leaving an abusive relationship while trying to rediscover who I was.
While all of these were marked by significant pain, none of this grief compared to the pain I felt at the beginning of this year after I miscarried twins. Grief is loss, at its very core. It paints two entirely different pictures that blend together: the person you were before, and the person you shift into after.
It’s learning how to hold space for the missing pieces, realizing that time is a symbol of both fragility and hope. It’s finding the strength to navigate the ache of what’s no longer there in a world that never stops moving. It’s knowing that even though it’s painful, what you’re carrying won’t always feel as heavy.
If you find yourself in a season of grieving, here’s the hard reality of grief and the lessons it unexpectedly taught me:
Grief Is Not About Fixing, It’s About Feeling
We can’t fix our way through pain. We can’t cover it up by ignoring it, numbing it or acting like it doesn’t exist.
Acceptance after loss doesn’t come easy. I was in complete shock and denial after losing the twins. I didn’t want to feel the pain, I only wanted to feel better. No part of me wanted to sit with the rawness of my reality. I only wanted to move through it as fast as possible until I reached the other side.
I kept wishing time would pass, yet time was the only tie to what I lost. It became a paradox, feeling like I had no sense of direction or knowing what to do next. But I learned the only way to truly heal and work through the layers of grief is to feel our emotions and deep fears entirely, without trying to wish away our pain.
A temporary fix never leads to a long-term gain. Healing isn’t linear, and it comes little by little, rather than all at once. It’s about learning how to unravel the threads of grief loosely, knowing that the only way out is through.
You Can’t Expect Others To Understand Your Pain
The truth about grief and loss is that while we can empathize with others and feel their heartbreak, we may never fully know the depths of their pain.
Shortly after my losses, I watched a video of a woman describing what it felt like to lose her mom. I remember thinking how I couldn’t even begin to imagine how she felt. She explained that her grief isn’t like anybody else’s, because nobody lost the same person she did.
And that’s when it clicked to me: even if situations seem similar, no two experiences of loss are exactly a mirror to each other. Your experience might be entirely different from somebody else’s, or maybe it isn’t the same at all, but it never makes it any less valid.
We can’t expect people to feel what we feel when they haven’t specifically walked in our shoes. While a lot of my friends haven’t experienced what I did, it didn’t mean they couldn’t hold space for my grief and how I felt. It also opened me up to a community of women that I wouldn’t have connected with otherwise, those who unfortunately walked a similar path as I did.
People can’t or won’t always understand how we feel, and we can’t expect them to. We’re brought who we need when we need them, even if it looks different from what we imagined.
Moving Forward Is Different From Moving On
There was a period of time when I felt like I wasn’t healing the right way or fast enough, in comparison to other people. It felt like I was stuck where I was, not knowing how or when I would “move on”.
We grieve for a number of different reasons: the loss of a loved one, the ache of a future that didn’t turn out how we thought it would, or memories that we can’t turn back the clock and relive. As the days passed and I went through the stages of grief, I learned there are some things that we simply won’t move on from in the way we thought we would.
Moving on, to me, felt like completely closing that chapter of my life as if it never happened. The ache of what’s lost will always be there because it matters and was real. Grief isn’t something we get over, it’s something we learn how to move forward with. It will always be a part of us, no matter how much time passes, which is the beauty of loving something so deeply.
It’s okay to take a step forward, even if it’s the smallest step. I remember telling my friend a month after it happened that I started feeling a “millimeter better”. We grow when times feel impossible, not when life is easy. And while there are some situations and experiences that will stay with us forever, it’s okay to learn how to live with them rather than acting like they never existed.
Moving forward isn’t the same as moving on. You learn to grow with and around your grief, not away from it. And it’s okay if you only feel a millimeter better, there’s no timeline for healing.
It Forever Changes Who You Once Were
I’m not the same person that I was seven months ago, and I have grief to thank for that.
While this year broke me down in ways I didn’t know were possible, it also gave me an undefined strength and purpose that I wouldn’t have found otherwise. I was met with the rawest version of myself, that, at times, I didn’t know how to keep showing up or how I’d make it through one day to the next.
But after I had time to process everything that happened, I started seeing things in a different light. I saw firsthand how fragile life is, and how one single moment can change everything. My outlook changed, my relationships changed, but my grief molded me into someone I wouldn’t be today if that had never happened.
Time will forever be marked by a before and after. I learned the meaning of grief coming in waves. No matter how many days passed, sometimes it would wash over me and bring me right back to where I was, especially when it seemed like I was finally making progress forward. There’s so much that’s out of our control, but what’s in our control is our perspective, our ability to see the light and how deeply we love even when we can’t fully understand our circumstances.
Grief found me in the dark. It sat with me in my lowest moments and even when I started coming up for air, it pulled me right back under. But it wasn’t in my grief that I lost who I was, it was in those deep trenches that I found my way back to myself.
You won’t be the same person you were before grief, but more often than not, you won’t want to be. Even though you’ll change in ways you didn’t know were possible, you’ll realize this next chapter of your life isn’t the end, it’s the beginning of who you’re becoming. Your pain is real because it mattered, and while some losses can never be replaced, they’re proof of how deeply you loved.
