Who I Became After Losing My Parents

When I lost both of my parents one month apart, the grief that followed didn't look like falling apart — it looked like making lunches, driving to school, and holding everything together while something inside me quietly broke open. This is the kind of loss so many women carry in their bodies while the world keeps asking things of them. And it can feel incredibly isolating, because from the outside, life still looks fine. But something inside is shifting. Something is asking for attention.

What we don't talk about enough is what grief actually does to us over time. It strips things away. The pretending. The tolerance for relationships that were slowly costing us something we couldn't quite name. The habit of abandoning ourselves in order to keep the peace. For women in midlife especially, loss has a way of clarifying what we can no longer carry — and that clarity, as painful as it is, can become part of returning to yourself.

If you're in a season where grief and change seem to be arriving all at once, there is one question worth sitting with — not as pressure, but as a gentle invitation. Not how do I get back to who I was? But: who am I now that I can finally see more clearly? You are not broken. You are not failing. You are waking up to yourself, right here, right where you are. And that is exactly where the work begins.