Experiencing Grief: Navigating Loss & Sadness

When I was young, I thought grief was something people experienced only after a physical death. Even then, my encounter with grief are from the deaths of people outside my immediate family, as my parents and siblings are still here with me to this day. I have also lost pets, and those losses felt devastating. I would cry for weeks while dealing with the pain.

But over the years, I’ve also felt sadness and hurt from other situations that I couldn’t fully explain. I found myself wondering: could those experiences also be considered grief?

There is one experience I’ve had that felt just as devastating as those losses: the ending of a relationship. It felt as though my heart had been broken into pieces, and the pain was unbearable. But isn’t this also a kind of death? The hurt is real, and the sense of loss is still there. No one ever told me that these kinds of experiences also require a process

of grieving. Instead, the advice I received was to stop being so dramatic, move on, and find someone new.

Fast forward to 2026. I’m single, living on a small island, and I’ve done a lot of inner work. So, things should be okay by now, right? Not quite. 😅

I came to experience a different kind of loss and sadness—not from physical death or even the heartbreak of a relationship, but from letting go of old identities. Of an old version of myself that needed to be shed.

The process of shedding that identity didn’t happen through one single transformative moment. It happened gradually, over the past five years since I moved here. Although it wasn’t an identity I was particularly proud of, I was still deeply saddened to let it go. I cried a lot to release it and gave myself permission to grieve what was no longer meant to remain.

But beneath that grief was another feeling: fear.

I was afraid that I would no longer know how to face life because the ways I had once relied on no longer felt possible, yet I had not fully learned how to live as the person I was becoming.

But life goes on, right?

Even while grieving and feeling afraid, we still have to live. As I slowly navigate my way through it, I’ve found small ways to cope and take care of myself. I have routines that help ground me: spending time with my cats, meditating, swimming, or talking to my best friends who know how to give me the space to simply be. I also try to eat healthy, get enough rest (I could take two or three naps on days when I feel completely lost 😁), spend time in nature, and most importantly, be gentle with myself.

As I write this, I haven’t fully figured everything out yet—and maybe I don’t have to.

But hopefully, for those who are going through something similar, this is a reminder that you are not alone. 🤗