When Your Body Becomes Someone You Miss

When most people hear the word grief, they think about death.

But grief doesn't always begin there.

Sometimes grief can look like standing in front of the mirror, staring at your reflection,  and deeply missing the body you used to know. It’s the heavy, quiet realization that your physical self no longer feels like you.

We see this happen all the time, and yet we rarely call it what it is. It can follow an illness, an injury, pregnancy, disability, infertility, menopause, aging, or surgery. 

If you have ever looked down at yourself and felt an ache for a previous version of you, please know this: you are not broken. You are not being dramatic. You are not “just being emotional.” 

You are grieving. 

Grieve Leave friend and disability advocate, Jayne Mattingly calls this body grief: "the longing and mourning that accompany the loss of bodily autonomy." Having language for that experience can be incredibly validating. 

We believe all types of grief deserve to be named. Because once we can name it, we can stop asking ourselves, "What's wrong with me?" 

We're taught to bounce back. To be resilient. To celebrate transformation without talking about everything it cost us to get there. We learn to hide the emotional weight of physical change instead of making space for it.

As Mattingly writes, "We live in a society that conditions us to push through pain rather than process." And when everyone else seems to be pushing through, it's easy to believe you're the only one quietly mourning your own body.

You aren’t. 

Body grief is grieving the body you had before cancer. Before disability. Before pregnancy. Before chronic illness. Before an eating disorder. Before menopause. Before aging changed the reflection looking back at you.

It can also look like grieving the body you hoped you'd have. The pregnancy that didn't happen. The mobility you thought you'd regain. The version of yourself you imagined would always be there.

No two stories are the same. The details of what brought us here will always look different. But the isolating feeling of losing trust in your own body, and the desperate wonder of whether anyone else understands, is far more universal than we realize. 

Mattingly writes that "Body grief has the potential to connect us, even when our individual experiences seem worlds apart." We couldn't agree more. 

The more we talk about body grief out loud, the easier it becomes to release the shame, recognize it in ourselves, and each other. Because your body has changed, and you’re allowed to miss it.  

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Read more of Jayne Mattingly's powerful essay, What Happens When We Properly Grieve Our Bodies, for TIME here.