The Life I Lost When I Chose Myself: Grieving the Woman Everyone Loved and Learning to Live as The One I Am
I didn’t know you could grieve a life you were still living.
No one tells you that when you stop abandoning yourself, parts of your old world will die, sometimes loudly, sometimes in the quiet way of unanswered texts and a calendar that doesn’t look like it used to. There’s no funeral for the you who was always “fine.” No black dress for the woman who finally drops the cape.
We don’t have much language for that kind of loss. So I made my own.
I call it abandoning self-abandonment, when you stop leaving yourself to stay chosen, to stay safe, to stay employed, to stay loved. It’s an act of honoring the parts of you that have been whispering, “Please don’t forget me.”
What I didn’t expect was the grief that would follow.
The Death of the Version of Me Everyone Loved
For most of my adult life, my value was measured in how well I disappeared.
I was the one who stayed late, picked up the extra work, listened to everyone’s crisis at 1 a.m., and still showed up polished, pleasant, productive. I knew how to perform “strong Black woman” so well I could have taught a masterclass.
On paper, I had the life I’d worked hard for: degrees, leadership roles, the “you’re so inspiring” DMs, the calendar full of meetings that proved how needed I was. If you took a screenshot, it would have looked like success.
But my body kept the receipts.
The tension that lived in my shoulders. The insomnia that smiled politely in Zoom meetings. The numbness that showed up in moments that were supposed to feel like joy. The quiet panic of realizing I didn’t know what I actually wanted, I only knew what I was good at surviving.
When I finally started listening to my own no’s, the first thing that died was the idea of myself I’d spent years curating.
And nobody warns you that choosing yourself can look, from the outside, like you’re ruining your life.
Meeting the Versions of Me I’d Left Behind
To survive, I had split myself into pieces without realizing it. Eventually, I personified and gave those parts of me names so I could stop pretending they didn’t exist.
Khalia: the quiet, sensual one, raised on religious shame and “good girl” rules, who learned early that her body and desire was dangerous.
Hunter: the athlete, the grinder, the one who knew how to outrun pain by outworking everyone in the room.
Nik: the teacher, the caretaker, the one who believed her worth lived in how many people she could help, even if she was falling apart.
Mari: the artist, the intuitive, the one who saw beauty and magic everywhere, but kept being told to “be realistic.”
For years, these parts of me worked for free carrying my trauma, shouldering my expectations, performing my way into rooms that didn’t know what to do with the fullness of me.
When I started my “Year of Kintsugi,” I didn’t realize I was signing up to intentionally disrupt my life and break up with an outdated version of myself.
I just knew I couldn’t keep pretending the cracks weren’t there.
Kintsugi, the Japanese art form intended to repair broken pottery using lacquer mixed with powdered gold. The damage and rejoining reflects the history of the object. The gold is intended to highlight the journey of the object and not disguise the broken pieces. This became the metaphor that held me. The idea that the brokenness is not the shame, it’s the story. That the mending can be both visible and beautiful.
But you have to admit something is broken before you ever touch the gold.
Identity Grief: Mourning the Self You Were Never Allowed to Be
There’s the grief that comes when you lose something you love. And then there’s the grief that comes when you realize you lost yourself while everyone was celebrating you.
I started saying no.
No to the projects that paid well but drained me.
No to being the crisis hotline loved one who never got to fall apart.
No to dating dynamics where I became therapist, mother, and emotional sponge, all in one.
Sometimes it feels isolating. Other times…powerful.
People who were used to my constant ‘yes’ didn’t know what to do with my boundaries. Some quietly stepped back. Some got angry. Some called me selfish. A few dear ones stayed and adjusted, but its been a long stretch where “choosing myself” has looked like long walks alone and a bank account that reflected the cost of leaving misaligned work.
That’s the part we rarely post or talk about.
We celebrate the glow-up, the rebrand, the “soft life.” But we don’t always discuss the prerequisites of the soft life: grief, confusion, and the very real terror and overwhelm of building a new self while the old one is still being requested.
I remember one night, sitting on my childhood bed, realizing I had spent decades being the “good one,” the “safe one,” the “responsible one” and I was exhausted. I had spent so much time being a home for everyone else that I had no idea where I lived.
The grief hit me like a breakup.
Not with a person but with a version of me I’d outgrown.
The Body Remembers What the Mind Tries to Negotiate
Grief is not just thoughts. It’s tissue, heartbeat, breath.
As I started to abandon self-abandonment, my body began reacting like someone had pulled the fire alarm.
The old scripts like “be grateful,” “don’t rock the boat,” “you’re too much,” “you’re too sensitive” didn’t just vanish because I changed my language. They lived in my muscles, in the way my shoulders tried to rise up and apologize for taking up space.
I started to notice how my body reacted when I was about to betray myself:
The tightness in my throat right before I said “Sure, no problem” when every fiber of me wanted to say, “Actually, I can’t.”
The sinking feeling in my gut when I ignored a red flag in work, in love, in my own health because I didn’t want to be “dramatic.”
The quiet ache after another night of scrolling, disconnected from my own desires, numbing instead of nurturing.
The body remembers.
That’s part of why I began building a meditation project I now call Free Spirit, not as a pretty wellness accessory, but as a survival tool. A way to score my own healing in real time. Sound became the bridge back to myself when words felt thick and clumsy.
Because the grief of self-abandonment doesn’t only live in memory, it lives in the nervous system, and healing lives there too.
Healing as a Series of Small, Disobedient Acts
Healing, for me, hasn’t been one big cinematic moment. It’s been a series of small rebellions against the life I built on over-functioning.
Lighting a candle and taking a shower like it was a ceremony, not a chore.
Listening to my own voice on a guided track and letting it hold me the way I had held everyone else.
Saying, “I actually need help,” and letting the silence after that sentence exist.
It’s been Khalia choosing pleasure without asking for permission from old doctrine.
Hunter putting the cape down and letting sweat be about joy, not punishment.
Nik letting her worth exist even when she’s not teaching, mentoring, fixing something or someone.
Mari making art that doesn’t have to justify itself with a grant proposal or social media validation.
And somewhere beyond them, Halo becomes the integrated self. She’s learning to walk into rooms confidently whole, without leaving parts of herself at the door to make others comfortable.
That wholeness still costs me things. Sometimes it costs me invitations. Sometimes it costs me the illusion of being easy to love.
But the more I practice, the more I see: every act of self-honoring ripples. When I model rest, other women exhale. When I tell the truth about my grief, how much I miss the version of me that could handle anything because she didn’t feel anything, someone else realizes they’re not weak for wanting out.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Loss
When we typically discuss loss, grief, and healing, our first thought is of funerals, diagnoses, heartbreak.
But lately, I think of the day I looked at my life and realized: I made this entire world while half of me was missing.
I grieved for the girl who swallowed her questions in church.
The woman who let jobs call her “family” while they quietly drained her spirit.
The version of me who knew how to shrink strategically to survive.
I still love her. I also had to let her go.
But there is a different kind of life on the other side of that grief.
One where your body is not an afterthought.
Where your “NO” is not a betrayal but a boundary.
Where your pleasure, your rest, your curiosity are not rewards for suffering they’re part of your daily ritual.
I am still very much in process. I have not mastered this. Some days, I still catch myself reaching for the cape, rehearsing the old lines: I’ve got it, no worries, I’m fine.
But more and more, I choose differently.
I put a hand on my chest.
I listen to my own breath.
And I say, out loud if I have to:
“I refuse to abandon myself for a life that can’t hold all of me.”
That sentence has cost me old versions of success, timelines I thought I’d be on by now, and the comfort of being easily understood.
It’s also giving me something I didn’t know how to grieve because I’d never really had it:
A life I don’t have to leave myself to live.
