Grief that has no funeral.
Grief isn't always black clothes and lilies.
Sometimes it's just you awake at 2am wondering if anyone else has ever felt this hollow.
Sometimes it's invisible,
Sometimes it's loud but only on the inside,
And sometimes it's the quiet aching goodbye to the person you had to be to survive.
And I know you know that kind of grief,
The kind that doesn't get named,
The kind that lingers like a shadow while life demands a smile.
It begins in the places that no one claps for,
The day you stopped laughing to keep the peace,
The years you overachieved to be loved,
The identity that you perfected just to feel safe.
This too is grief.
Grief for the childhood you were gaslit out of mourning.
Grief for the family you kept chasing into your adult relationships.
Grief for the diagnosis that finally explained it all but didn't rewind the years that it stole.
You grieve the mask,
The polished agreeable version of you that smiled on command,
The caretaker,
The peacekeeper,
The overachiever,
All the roles you mastered to feel like you were enough.
And when those masks start to fall,
You don't just lose the role,
You also lose the applause that came with it.
And no one tells you how heavy that silence feels.
No one tells you that healing can feel like abandonment,
That becoming who you really are might mean letting go of everything you built to be loved.
But you're not alone in this because in the ruins of all that pretending,
You find the most sacred thing of them all,
The truth.
The truth of your sensitivity,
Of your intuition,
Of your refusal to keep betraying yourself or belonging,
To start to notice your own pulse,
Your own hunger,
Your own voice,
And suddenly it's not grief anymore.
You rise,
Not like the movies,
And no,
Not all at once,
But slowly in moments.
When you say no and mean it,
When you cry and you don't apologize,
When you rest without earning it,
And when you speak your truth,
Even if your voice shakes,
This too is healing.
This too is resurrection.
Grief becomes power when you stop running from it,
When you name it,
Hold it,
And let it burn from whatever it was that was never yours to carry.
So if your grief has no funeral,
No eulogy,
No witness,
Know this.
You were allowed to mourn what the world never acknowledged.
You were allowed to outgrow versions of you that kept you safe,
But also small.
Because you didn't just survive,
You returned home to yourself.
You came home,
Not broken,
But becoming.
Grief is not the enemy.
It's the portal,
The sacred in-between where your old self dissolves and your true self begins.
So go ahead and walk through it unapologetically,
Unmasked,
And unbound.
You are not who you were.
You are who you chose to become.
And that,
That changes everything.
