The Life I Had to Grieve

On letting go of imagined futures, borrowed identities, and the need to be chosen

For a long time, I thought I was grieving a relationship. I thought I was grieving Australia too. A country I had loved, a life I had begun to settle into, a version of myself I thought had finally found where she belonged.

But the truth is, I wasn’t grieving reality.

I was grieving imagination.

I was grieving the life I had already built in my head.
A boyfriend, his family, the Australian Christmases, an intelligent family table.
A village life with herb gardens and chickens.
A certain kind of belonging.
A certain kind of being loved.
A certain kind of future where everything had finally fallen into place.

None of it had happened.
And yet, I mourned it as though it had been taken from me.

I think that’s what we do when one door closes. 

We think we’re grieving the door. Often, we’re grieving the life we built behind it.

And sometimes that life becomes so vivid, so emotionally furnished, that we stop being able to tell the difference between what was and what we hoped would be.

That is where the suffering begins, in the story we wrote around it.
The future we quietly moved into before life had even agreed to it.

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The Future That Never Happened

When I left Australia, I wasn’t just leaving a country.

I was leaving a whole internal world.

A version of me who had made it work.
A version of me who had settled.
A version of me who was loved, chosen, needed, secure.
A version of me who had built a life that made sense on paper, and perhaps even to the people around me.

There was a man, there were his children and an ex-wife.
There was the comfort of a life that had shape, routine, and recognisable edges.

And yet somewhere in me, I already knew.

I knew I was frustrated in the relationship.
I knew my chapter there was ending.
I knew I was trying to force myself into a future that no longer fit the woman I was becoming.

Knowing that didn’t stop the grief. Because the heart doesn’t let go just because the mind has understood something.

And perhaps that’s one of the hardest parts of letting go.
You can know a door is not for you anymore.
You can know a person is not right.
You can know a place is no longer yours.
And still find yourself standing outside it, weeping for the life you thought it would give you.

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What Are We Really Holding On To?

I’ve asked myself this question many times since. When we can’t let go, what are we actually holding on to?

Is it the person? Or the feeling of being loved?
Is it the job? Or the identity it gave us?
Is it the country? Or the certainty we imagined it promised?
Is it the dream itself? Or the version of us that finally gets to feel enough through it?

When I kept peeling the layers back, I realised I wasn’t just attached to Australia, or to a relationship, or to a future.

I was attached to what they made me feel.
Needed.
Chosen.
Important.
Special.
Wanted.
Safe.

And that is a much harder grief to admit.

Because then we have to face the fact that what we called love was sometimes validation.
What we called hope was sometimes attachment.
What we called “this is meant for me” was sometimes fear in a prettier dress.

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The Need To Be Needed

This was one of the most uncomfortable truths I had to sit with.
Beneath all the longing was a quieter hunger. I wanted to be needed.

Needed by a partner.
Needed by a family.
Needed by a place.
Needed by a future.

I wanted to feel that my life had weight in someone else’s world.
That my presence mattered.
That I was not easily replaceable.
That I was special enough to be chosen and important enough to be kept.

I don’t think I’m alone in this.

How many of us stay in situations long after they stop feeling right, simply because they make us feel significant?
How many of us cling to roles, relationships, careers, identities, not because they are nourishing us, but because they tell us who we are?
How many of us confuse being needed with being loved?

Sometimes a closed door hurts not because we lost the thing itself, but because we lost the mirror that told us we mattered.

And when that mirror disappears, we panic. We no longer know who we are without that reflection.

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The Years We Spend Bargaining With Reality

There is a strange kind of suffering that comes from refusing to let reality be what it is.

It sounds like this:

This shouldn’t have happened.
Maybe it will still work out.
Maybe if I wait a little longer.
Maybe if I become better, softer, wiser, more lovable, more patient.
Maybe if I hold on, life will return what it took.

I know this voice well.
I lived in it for a while.

I had left the relationship, the country, and I had jumped, as I often do, into the abyss of the unknown.
But I hadn’t left the fantasy.

I was still holding on to the what-if.
Still bargaining with reality.
Still mentally revisiting a future that had no real basis in my journey, but had made itself very comfortable in my imagination.

And that did something to me.

It made me focus so intently on what I did not get, that I became temporarily stuck in my own life.
Stuck in guilt.
Stuck in failure.
Stuck in the story that I had somehow ruined something that was supposed to save me.

Luckily, I recognised it.
And something in me decided I did not want to live that way.
I did not want to drag the dead weight of an imagined life behind me. I wanted to live light.

I just didn’t yet know how.

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Letting Go Did Not Begin Gracefully

If I’m honest, letting go did not begin as some graceful spiritual process.
It began in a mess.

It began with me hiding from the world a little.
Battling my parents’ disappointment and expectations.
Battling the teenager in me that turned up as a defence mechanism to the parents.
Pretending everything would somehow work out because that’s what people say, isn’t it?
If it doesn’t work out, it isn’t the end.

But in that moment, it did not feel poetic.
It felt raw and embarrassing.
It felt like my life had collapsed in on itself and left me sitting in the rubble trying to make meaning out of it.

I had come back during Covid, at a time when hiring was almost impossible.
Life had suddenly given me time.
Though I didn’t see it as a gift immediately.
At first it felt like emptiness, uncertainty, a strange pause I had not chosen.

And slowly, in that pause, I began to see something.

After everyone had abandoned me,
I could not become another person who abandoned me too.

I could not leave myself just because life had not gone according to plan.
I could not reject myself because I had disappointed others.
I could not punish myself because the future I had built in my mind had not come true.

So I stayed.

With all my doubts, all my fears, my self-judgements, my shame and my disappointments.
All the questions I did not yet know how to answer.

I stayed with myself through all of it.
And I think that was the real beginning.
Not healing. Not transcendence. Not some great awakening.

Just the quiet decision to stop abandoning myself.

To sit with myself, despite what I liked and did not like.
To remain with myself when I felt lost.
To remain with myself when I did not know what was coming next.
To remain with myself when there was no applause, no certainty, no one telling me I had done the right thing.

I was learning to unabandon myself.

And maybe that is where letting go truly begins.

Not in releasing the other person.
Not in “moving on.”
But in deciding that whatever has happened, you will not leave yourself through it.

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Silence Showed Me What Distraction Had Hidden

I removed distractions.
I stopped the socials.
I moved my body.
I travelled.
I disciplined myself.
I spent long periods alone, often with no phone, no noise, no constant input from the world.
Sometimes it was just me, soft flute music, and the contents of my own mind.

And when all the distractions went quiet, everything else got louder.

The grief.
The guilt.
The shame.
The fantasies.
The fears.
The old identities.
The old stories.
The old selves who still wanted to be right, to be seen, to be defended.

I was not just sitting in silence.
I was harbouring every thought my mind could come up with.
I was allowing every question to rise.
Every feeling to resurface.
Every uncomfortable truth to come sit beside me.

And somewhere in all that, something shifted.

I started questioning the “I” behind it all.

Not in an intellectual way or as some spiritual exercise.

It was more like the stories stopped making sense.
The identities I had built over thirty-five years began to loosen.
The lies I had told myself became visible.
The truths I had hidden from myself began to surface.

I could feel that there was no fixed self inside all of this.
No stable identity to defend.
No single story that could contain me.

And strangely, that didn’t feel terrifying.
It felt like relief.

Because if I was not only the abandoned one, the disappointed one, the failed one, the heartbroken one, the one who “messed it all up”…
then perhaps I was also free.

Free from the stories.
Free from the identities.
Free from the imagined future I had mistaken for truth.

I witnessed the emotions.
I witnessed the stories.
But slowly, they stopped feeling like me.

And when that happened, clarity came.

Not because life suddenly made sense.
But because I had stopped arguing with what had already happened.

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Yogasana Taught Me Trust Before Life Did

I think the inner journey really began on the mat.

In doing yogasanas, with my eyes closed. Something about staying with sensation, breath, discomfort, stillness…took me inward.
Something about not reaching outward, but learning to stay in my body… began to change me.

I started trusting what I could feel, not just what I could think.
I started listening inwardly.
My body and mind slowly began to align in a way they hadn’t before.
The energy shifted.
The noise softened.
The inquiry deepened.

And from there, everything began to open.

I began to trust myself.

And that mattered more than anything else.

Because before I could trust life, or God, or the universe, or timing, or uncertainty…
I had to trust that I would not abandon myself again.

That even if everything familiar fell apart, I would still have me.
Not the old me.
Not the identity.
Not the role.
But the deeper self underneath all of it.
The one that remains when everything else is stripped away.

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Life Became Larger Than My Imagination

What changed everything was not some single epiphany.

It was lived experience.

The first two years after I left were full of things I could never have planned.
People I could never have imagined meeting.
Experiences I could never have scripted.
Places I could never have predicted.
Miracles that arrived unannounced.

Slowly, trust grew.

Not because someone told me to trust the universe.

Life kept showing me, again and again,
that it was far more creative than my mind.

That what was meant to be experienced in my life for my growth would not pass me by.
That I did not need to cling so tightly.
That not every closed door was a mistake.
Some were redirections.
Some were endings.
Some were invitations into a life I simply could not yet see.

And perhaps that is what finally helped me let go.

Not the promise that life would give me something “better.”
But the deep knowing that life was larger than what I had imagined for myself.

Larger than the relationship.
Larger than Australia.
Larger than the woman I thought I had to be.
Larger than every future I had built from fear, lack, validation, or longing.

And once I truly saw that, the closed door lost its power.

Not because it stopped mattering.
But because it was no longer the centre of my life.

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Maybe This Is What Letting Go Really Is

Maybe letting go is not about becoming indifferent.
Not about pretending it didn’t hurt.
Not about forcing yourself to “move on.”
Not about convincing yourself that what you wanted was never beautiful.

Maybe it is about seeing clearly.

Seeing that some of what we are grieving never existed outside the mind.
Seeing how much of our suffering comes from the identities we built around certain outcomes.
Seeing how often we confuse love with validation, and certainty with safety, and being needed with being worthy.
Seeing the ways we abandon ourselves while trying to hold on to a life that has already moved on.

And then, slowly, learning to come back.

Back to the body.
Back to the breath.
Back to the self.
Back to what is here.
Back to the life that is actually unfolding, not the one we keep bargaining for.

I don’t think the door was ever the real issue.

The real issue was that I had made that door my whole life.

And perhaps that is what so many of us do.

We stand outside one closed door for so long that we forget there is an entire world behind us.
An entire life.
A thousand experiences.
A thousand versions of love.
A thousand ways to belong.
A thousand chances to meet ourselves again.

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If You Are Standing Outside A Closed Door Right Now

Ask yourself gently…

What am I really grieving?

The person?
The place?
The opportunity?

Or the version of me that I believed could only exist through it?

What did I imagine that door would finally give me?

Love?
Belonging?
Safety?
Validation?
Importance?
A future?
A self?

And if life is asking me to let go… can I trust myself enough to stop bargaining with reality?

Can I trust that I do not need to know what comes next in order to release what is already over?

Can I stay with myself through the uncertainty, instead of abandoning myself just because I am afraid?

Because maybe certainty was never meant to come from the future.
Maybe it was meant to come from the quiet knowing that whatever life places before you next… you will meet it.

And maybe the closed door is not a punishment.
Maybe it is not proof that you failed.
Maybe it is not the end of your story.

Maybe it is simply the place where the life you imagined ends… and the life that is actually yours begins.