What If Grief Has Always Been With Us?

Somewhere along the way, we were taught to think of grief as a reaction, something that arrives only after loss.

But what if that’s not the whole truth?

What if everything we’ve been taught about grief is incomplete?

What if grief isn’t something that visits us, but something we are born into?

What if we have never not known it?

We come into this world screaming. Not just because of breath or instinct, but because we are losing something profound. The womb. The pulse of our mother. The warmth of the before. The soft in-between place where we were held in rhythm, in silence, in unity. We emerge into separation, into air, into gravity, and somewhere in us, we remember what we’ve lost.

I don’t believe grief is an emotion.

I believe it is the very shape of being human.

The condition of embodiment.

To be here at all is to be in relationship with change, and therefore, with loss.

It begins at birth, and it never really leaves us. Because being human means living in a world where everything changes, everything passes, everything we love will someday transform. And still, we love.

Grief isn’t the shadow of life.

It’s the thread running through all of it.

It’s what makes beauty shimmer. What makes love matter. What makes time sacred.

Every threshold asks us to let something go.

Every becoming requires a death.

And with every ending, something in us remembers that we have been here before.

Grief is not the opposite of love.

It is love’s imprint. Love’s echo.

The way the soul honors what it has touched.

We are not broken for carrying grief.

We are made of it.

And maybe the real question is not how to heal it or escape it, but how to walk with it, reverently, as the oldest part of ourselves.

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What would change if we let grief walk beside us as a teacher, not a threat?

What if it’s not something to overcome, but a doorway into deeper love?