Somewhere in the business of living, you set yourself down.
Maybe it happened gradually — the way it usually does. The grief came, and you went into survival mode. You kept showing up. You kept functioning. You did what needed to be done. And somewhere in all of that doing, the person you were before — or maybe the person you were becoming — got quietly set aside.
This isn’t a failure. It’s what grief does. It takes so much of you just to carry it that there isn’t always room for much else.
But here’s what I want you to know: that self didn’t leave.
I’ve watched people come back to themselves after years — sometimes decades — of feeling like a hollowed-out version of who they used to be. And what strikes me every time is that the return isn’t about becoming who you were before the loss. That person is gone, and honestly, that’s okay. Grief changes us. It’s supposed to.
The self that’s waiting for you is someone new. Someone who has been through something and survived it. Someone with a depth they didn’t have before.
But finding that person requires something most of us were never taught to do: to stop moving long enough to listen.
Not to the noise of the day. Not to the voice that says you should be further along by now, or handling this better, or feeling something different than what you feel. But to the quieter voice underneath all of that — the one that still knows what you love, what you need, what you’re here for.
That voice doesn’t go away. It waits.
The work I do is, at its heart, about helping people find their way back to that voice. Back to themselves. Not the self before the loss — but the self that’s been quietly growing in the dark, waiting for you to come looking.
You lost yourself in the grief. That makes sense.
But you are still there. And it’s not too late to find your way back.