A Different Kind of Grieving

It’s possible to grieve for not something you lost but something that you never had. You grieve lost time in this case, a part of your life that could have been a certain way but wasn’t. Nursing a disappointment that comes to you after it has passed is like opening a wound that you didn’t realize had scabbed over. You feel betrayed by the misaligned timing of opportunities that the world handed you. It’s hard work to process this type of loss because there is nothing concrete to point at for its absence. 

It might be possible to discount this feeling as a hurt that could be let go if you let go of your sense of entitlement to how you wanted your life to be. The universe didn’t promise you anything when you entered it. 

But here, we are talking about desire. 

A desire to not gain something at the expense of something or someone else but a longing. It is inappropriate to tack on any sort of morality or forget-and-get-on-with-it mentality to a heart that didn’t know what it was missing but now knows and feels intensely in hindsight. Then only one question is appropriate. If you had picked up an injured bird from the street, you would cradle it in your hands. How do you cradle yourself in grief? No grief is too small or gentle to be disregarded but their expressions do differ. Some sweep us up and away more destructively than others. It seems important to not let the varying degrees and ways that grief expresses itself tell you which grief is significant or not, but to let them be a guide in how best to take care of yourself.