Grief is a word that has been on my mind a lot this past year — particularly the different layers of grief, the ways we experience it, and the ways the outside world understands or responds to it.
There are forms of grief we collectively know how to recognize. There is an understood weight to the loss of a loved one, a devastating diagnosis, a physical injury, a home, maybe even a relationship.
And then there are quieter forms of grief that don’t always look like grief from the outside — losses that can be harder for others to recognize or understand.
Throughout my entire career, I have had the privilege of sitting alongside women navigating one of these less recognizable forms: the deeply personal grief that can accompany chronic, confusing, complex or less conventional health issues.
The kind of health journey where you keep looking for answers and continue to hit dead ends. Where conventional medicine sometimes meets you with a shrug of the shoulders, another “everything looks normal,” or few places left to look.
And even when you enter the functional space — where there may be more questions to ask, more testing to explore, more direction and more possibility — the journey can still feel daunting and, at times, incredibly esoteric.
One answer opens another question. One layer of the onion reveals another.
And eventually, those layers often extend far beyond the science of the body.
Healing has a way of taking you places you never expected to go.
You begin by learning about systems, pathways and physiology you never knew existed. And somewhere along the way, you may find yourself exploring the quieter parts of healing too — your nervous system, feelings and emotions, suppressed trauma, the energetics of healing, your relationship to spirituality, strengthening your intuition and refining your relationship with yourself.
And sometimes what you find in those quieter places isn’t particularly quiet.
There can be anger. Rage. Parts of yourself you barely recognize, fuming underneath the surface. Anger at your body. At what has happened. At how much time has been lost. At the people who didn’t understand. At how unfairly difficult something has been that seems to come with ease for someone else.
And sometimes, underneath that, there are harder realizations still — moments of recognizing where you have rejected yourself, betrayed what you knew to be true, abandoned your own needs, or spent years trying to override what your body or inner knowing was asking of you.
There can be grief in seeing those things clearly too, especially when you’re making those discoveries in a season where you already feel like you’re trying to scaffold yourself back together.
I saw a cheeky Instagram Reel recently joking that hurt people go to therapy and traumatized people somehow end up finding tarot, astrology and Reiki. It made me laugh because, in its own self-deprecating way, there is some truth tucked in there — patterns I have witnessed again and again, and experienced myself.
These journeys crack us open.
What starts as I JUST want to feel better. I just want to feel like myself again. can become an exploration of who you actually are. What you believe. What safety means to you. How you listen to your body. How you relate to yourself. How you relate to others. And eventually, how you relate to the world around you.
And when I say these journeys crack us open, I mean there are moments when you realize: I can’t unsee what I’ve seen.
Your perspective has shifted. Your relationship with yourself, another person, your body, your health — maybe even life itself — has shifted. Sometimes that can feel strange and disorienting. There can be grief in realizing that you aren’t going back to exactly who you were before.
But there can also be something deeply meaningful in what we do with what we’ve walked through — in the slow process of alchemizing some of that pain into something different.
There can be an expansion here. A rebirth. A shift in consciousness. A deeper relationship with yourself that perhaps would never have existed without traveling through something you never would have chosen.
There is a quote by Cynthia Occelli that I have shared with clients for years:
“For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes. To someone who doesn’t understand growth, it would look like complete destruction.”
I think about that last line often.
Because when something is changing you so profoundly on the inside and the people around you cannot see or understand the magnitude of what you are moving through, there can be incredible loneliness layered into the grief.
Can’t you see I’m hurting? Can’t you see I’m struggling? Can’t you see how much this is asking of me?
Your life may still look relatively intact from the outside while internally, entire parts of your world are being dismantled and rebuilt.
There is grief in that.
Not only grief over symptoms, but grief over what those symptoms — and the journey itself — have changed.
The experiences you have missed. The ease you once had. The relationship you used to have with your body. The mental space now occupied by trying to understand it. The money, time and energy it has required. The version of yourself you remember being. And the uncertainty of not knowing when — or sometimes if — this chapter will change.
Will this get better? Will I feel like myself again? When do I get to move forward?
I see this grief in the mom who desperately wants to be more present with her children but is using so much of her capacity simply trying to make it through the day.
I see it in the woman who wants to date, travel and move her life forward, but feels trapped in a body she doesn’t recognize and symptoms she can’t predict.
I see it in the woman continuing to show up at work and at home, providing for the people around her, while privately struggling to keep her own head above water.
And I see it profoundly in fertility — in the couples who desperately want to start or grow their family, continuing to hit dead ends while watching something they ache for seem to happen so easily around them.
With October being Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month, I am especially mindful of the profound grief of pregnancy loss, alongside the many quieter losses that can accumulate throughout a complicated fertility journey — the timelines, expectations, pregnancies, treatments and versions of the future that didn’t unfold as imagined.
And then there is the grief that can ripple into our relationships.
Because how we relate to ourselves is deeply connected to how we relate to others.
Sometimes, as our relationship with ourselves changes, we begin to see our relationships differently too. Friendships change. Family dynamics that once felt grounding may no longer feel like home. The places, people or structures that once created a sense of safety can shift underneath us.
And sometimes that creates more grief.
Grief also has a way of showing us how the people around us respond when life becomes difficult. I have always believed that you don’t forget the people who showed up for you in some of your lowest moments.
And those moments don’t have to make sense to anyone else in order to be some of the lowest moments for you.
Perhaps I recognize this grief so clearly because I know pieces of it myself. Much of my 20s was spent navigating complex health issues that were difficult for the people around me to fully understand. It took me into parts of myself, my body and my life I likely never would have explored had that not been part of my story.
And I think one of the quieter gifts — if we can call it that — of having walked through seasons of profound personal grief is the capacity it creates to recognize pain in another person, even when their experience looks nothing like your own.
You learn that you don’t have to fully understand someone’s experience to understand that it hurts.
You don’t have to believe you would respond the same way to recognize that something has shaken their world.
You don’t have to see the wound to know that someone needs tenderness around it.
And through different experiences with grief over the years, one thing I keep coming back to is this: Grief needs somewhere to go.
It needs space to be held and acknowledged. And I believe grief deserves to be witnessed.
Not with the pressure to change it, fix it, make meaning of it or move someone through it faster — but with the willingness to be present with someone while it exists, and while they find their own way through.
There is something profoundly powerful about having a community of support around you as you navigate your own path of healing. People who are not expected to take the grief away, but are willing to sit beside you in it.
I’m not sharing this today because I have an answer for how to move through your grief.
I’m sharing it because I think there is power in simply naming that it exists — and in allowing one another to be seen within it.
For anyone who has felt lonely, misunderstood or unseen while navigating a complicated relationship with their health, their body, their fertility, their relationships — or a future that feels unfairly delayed, put on pause, or diverted from the path they thought they would be walking:
I see the weight of what you have been carrying.
If this resonated with you or brought something up from your own experience, you’re always welcome to respond directly to this email and share.
And if you’re navigating a complex health or fertility journey and want to connect more closely about what support could look like, you can schedule a complimentary Clarity Call with me here.
