What do we do when the future doesn’t feel solid anymore? No one talks about this kind of loss.
I don’t know if you’ve been feeling it too. The uncertainty in the air.
Everywhere I turn, people are talking about how unstable things feel. The economy swinging wildly. Political shifts that feel too big and too chaotic to predict. The slow realization that the way things were politically, financially, even socially, might not be the way they’ll be much longer.
It’s unsettling.
Not because we haven’t seen it before. But because, deep down, we’re wired to want solid ground beneath our feet. We want to know that the world we’ve invested in, the one we’ve worked for, built plans around, imagined futures inside, is actually going to hold.
And when it doesn’t?
It triggers something deeper than worry. It triggers grief.
Because grief isn’t just about losing a person. It’s about losing certainty. Losing trust in the future. Losing the quiet belief that things will unfold the way we always thought they would.
And that kind of grief is everywhere right now.
I’ve lived through a lot of loss. More than most people ever will.
And what I’ve learned, over and over, is this:
Grief doesn’t just happen when something ends. It happens when you realize you’re not going back to what once was.
And maybe, you’re not meant to.
Because the future you imagined might not be available anymore, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t another future waiting to take its place. One you haven’t met yet. One that needs the version of you that’s being shaped by all of this.
I’m going to be talking about this more in the coming weeks. Because if you’ve been feeling like the ground is shifting under you, that feeling makes sense. And you’re not alone in it.
For now, I just want to ask: How has grief, and I mean any kind of grief, changed you in ways no one talks about?
Jonni
P.S. No, you don’t go back to who you were before. You’re not meant to. And that might be the greatest gift grief gives you.
