There’s a kind of grief moving through a lot of people right now that doesn’t get called grief. We’ve been trained to reserve that word for death or for the obvious losses. When it shows up in its overlooked forms, we reach for panic-primed language instead, missing what’s actually happening.
Not being met is an unrecognizable form of grief. You can see, feel, and name things the people around you can’t yet, and the distance that creates is a real loss. It’s the loss of being understood in the ways you know you need.
Unmet expectation is grief. Unmet expectations of yourself, of others, and of how this was all supposed to feel by now. You called it impatience. You called it failure. You called it taking too long. It was grief.
The grief of realizing a connection was codependent. That’s what felt like love or support was partly an arrangement to avoid yourself. Naming that is a loss, even when it frees you.
The grief of your own body not moving at the speed your mind wants. The locking up at the thought of expansion. You called that dysfunction. It’s grief held in tissue.
The grief of outsourced power. The slow recognition that you’ve been looking for your own source outside yourself for so long that bringing it home feels like losing something.
None of these announce themselves as grief. So people do everything except sit with them. They outsource them to practitioners, partners, the next framework, or the next person who might finally validate the weight. The running is understandable. It’s also the exact thing keeping the grief unprocessed.
I’d like to offer a framework here. You can return to it as many times as you need to.
The conditions we inherited never trained us for honesty in the sincere sense. They trained us for honesty in the survival sense. In other words, disclose what’s safe, calibrate to consequence, protect yourself. As a result, sincere self-honesty isn’t something you already have and forgot. It’s something you have to build, often in the exact environments that taught you not to.
Which means the inner work is paradoxical by design. You’re training yourself to be honest where you were forced to be dishonest. To feel safe where your history says unsafe. To stand in confidence where the old wiring says insecure. Not by pretending. By building the internal condition before the external one arrives, to confirm it’s allowed.
I want to offer mechanical language, stripped of the wellness vocabulary. Self-honesty speeds up and sharpens your internal processing unit—your body, your intelligence. Dishonesty forces your system to run two tracks at once—what’s true and the version you’re presenting—and that overhead slows everything down, even when you’re quick on your feet or think you’re already sharp. Tell yourself the truth, and the two tracks merge into one. The system stops spending itself to maintain the gap.
But that honesty comes pre-loaded with discomfort, because the body remembers what honesty cost before. Ridicule. Policing. Being gaslit or ostracized. So, telling the truth now arrives braced for a consequence that may not even come. Moving through that bracing is the disorienting part. Not the truth itself, but the anticipation of what telling it used to bring.
People often skip or downplay this part, but you meet that disorientation with as much gentleness as you can hold. Breath. Presence. Kindness toward grief rather than grading it. This is where you make friends with your body. It is the living, breathing source of your power that you were trained to treat as the problem.
You can hear whether someone’s done this work in their language. Unprocessed, the words run panic-primed, danger-primed, suffering-primed. As the capacity builds, the language shifts. It starts reaching for safety and groundedness without dismissing the pain, without pretending the danger wasn’t real. The settled language is the body’s processing having caught up to the honesty.
More and more people are being pushed into a kind of energetic quarantine right now. It may feel like a punishing prison, but it’s a container. It’s the space to unlearn how you’ve been speaking to yourself and how you’ve been taking care of yourself—and to train language that’s rooted in safety and actions that are grounded in it.
It can feel like a collapse. But it’s the slow work of bringing your power home.
And when you do, you find the thing underneath everything you thought you wanted. It was never the material thing itself. It was conditions proportional and sustainable enough that the material could arrive without you clutching it for safety. That’s what dissolves the grip. Not getting more. Building enough internal steadiness that what comes can land as nourishment instead of becoming the next thing you latch onto.
That’s the slow, disorienting, but honest work of pioneering a different way of being more human while having to exist in inhumane conditions.
And it’s already underway in you, or you wouldn’t have felt any of this land.
In the meantime, and in between time, please be kind and gentle with yourself, as I do the same.
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