No One Warns You About the Grief of Becoming Someone New

As I write this on the tarmac of the airport, another day, another blog, I realise this is my first piece for 2026. And instead of feeling renewed or energised, I’m sitting with something quieter — heavier.

Grief.

Not for a person.

Not for a place.

But for the version of myself that no longer exists.

When this feeling first surfaced, I genuinely thought something was wrong with me. How could I be grieving growth? Isn’t change meant to feel empowering? Isn’t becoming “more” supposed to come with momentum, clarity, excitement?

That’s what people say.

That’s what we’re taught to expect.

But the past twelve months haven’t felt like expansion — they’ve felt like disintegration followed by reconstruction. Slow. Uncomfortable. Often lonely.

And the hardest part is this: no one really understands it.

Even when I try to explain it, the words fall short. Not because people don’t care — but because this kind of internal shift isn’t something that can be translated. It’s a road that has to be walked alone. You can describe it, but you can’t hand someone the feeling. You have to move through it yourself.

There is a strange kind of mourning that comes with becoming someone new. You don’t notice it immediately. It shows up quietly — as restlessness, as fatigue, as a subtle sense of emotional displacement you can’t quite name. You look at your life and recognise it, yet feel slightly removed from it.

You’re still functioning. Still showing up. Still carrying responsibility.

But something familiar is gone.

And no one really prepares you for that.

We celebrate milestones. We applaud growth. We praise resilience. But we rarely talk about the cost of it — the internal shedding that happens long before anything external changes. The identities you outgrow without ceremony. The versions of yourself that carried you through seasons but can’t follow you into the next one.

What made this season especially confronting is how much unlearning it demanded of me.

Unlearning has been far harder than learning.

Letting go of patterns.

Of over-explaining.

Of carrying conversations that were never mine to carry.

I’ve had to hone my skills around interpersonal relationships in a way that felt uncomfortable at first — learning to genuinely leave what does not concern me. Learning that not every tone needs decoding. Not every sentence needs analysis. Not every silence needs meaning assigned to it.

For so long, I over-analysed every line someone said to me. Every pause. Every shift. As if understanding everything would somehow protect me.

It didn’t.

What it did was weigh me down.

This season has been an awakening in that sense — realising how much mental load I was carrying unnecessarily. How much energy was being spent interpreting, managing, softening, anticipating. Letting go of that has been confronting, but also freeing.

I think what made this grief harder to understand was that nothing was wrong. There was no singular loss I could point to. Life didn’t collapse — it simply shifted. And somehow, that made the ache harder to justify.

I found myself asking: How can I feel sadness when I’m moving forward?

How can something good feel so heavy?

But growth isn’t clean. Becoming isn’t linear. And transformation doesn’t always arrive with joy — sometimes it arrives with silence.

There is a tenderness in realising you can’t go back. That the person you once were — the way you moved, thought, responded — has served their purpose. Not because they failed, but because they fulfilled it.

And maybe that’s what this grief really is.

Not resistance.

Not weakness.

But acknowledgement.

An understanding that becoming someone new requires letting go of someone familiar — and even when the future is meaningful, the farewell still matters.

I’m learning that this kind of grief doesn’t need fixing. It doesn’t mean you’re ungrateful or broken. It simply means you’re conscious enough to notice the shift.

And perhaps that awareness — uncomfortable as it is — is part of the becoming too.