“I am homesick for a place I am not even sure exists anymore. Or maybe I am homesick for a person I no longer am.” — Unknown
We’re taught that grief belongs exclusively to the dead, as we tend to treat it as a language spoken only at gravesides. But, there is a specific kind of grief that doesn’t arrive with an ominous black veil or a funeral march. Instead, it can catch you in the middle of a golden July afternoon, in that heavy, honey-thick silence of a hot summer day. It’s the way the light filters through the trees, mirroring a Sunday three years ago. Or maybe it’s a sudden, sharp scent of sun-warmed pavement that smells exactly like a version of home you no longer live in.
Lately, my derivative of grief lives in a folder on my phone labeled “Memories.”
I find myself scrolling back, past the mundane, past the blurred shots of dinner, until I hit the timestamp of “X Years Ago Today.” I click into the folder and suddenly, I’m looking at someone who no longer exists. It was then that I realized the most profound losses aren’t always people we’ve buried — sometimes, they are the versions of ourselves we simply forgot to keep.
We often label feelings such as these as “nostalgia,” but I believe they’re much more than that. There is a specific kind of “growing pain” that has nothing to do with height and everything to do with the quiet loss of who we used to be. Sometimes, the old snapshots of myself bring fond remembrance of different times in my life. Other times, it brings melancholy with a sense of nostalgia that is almost indistinguishable from grief.
Change seems to be one of the only things in life we are promised. From the frantic energy of youth to the messy transition of adolescence and into the high stakes of adulthood, we are constantly being rewritten by the ways of the world. We never seem to be bound by the process of change; we are fueled by it, propelled forward into a version of ourselves we haven’t yet met.
For a long time, I tried to stay ahead of that momentum. I used to wear the label “mature for my age” like a badge of honor. Part of me loved the ego of it, and the other part simply believed it because I was told it so often. But being “grown-up” didn’t exempt me from missing the childlike obliviousness I once took for granted. There is a quiet cruelty in that transition, and you don’t realize how heavy the world is until you’re no longer protected by what you don’t know.
I see now that I outgrew friends, bodies, behaviors, and hobbies, and for that I grieve. The girls I once called sisters have faded into a distant visage. We used to have shared secrets and whispered trusts, but now, the intimacy we had seems fictitious. Even with the friends I hold so dear and close to my heart, I mourn the times we frolicked on the school grounds gossiping about boys and whether they felt for us as we did to them.
I found myself outgrowing people and my own body all at once, as if my very shape was a house I no longer fit into. I watched my hips widen and my face lose its softness, the blurred edges of childhood sharpening into something permanent and defined. There is a jagged, specific bitterness to aging as a woman, with this suffocating expectation to remain eternally slender yet fertile. I often find myself mourning the body I used to inhabit, even if it lacked the “maturity” I’m supposed to prize now. I miss the lightness of a frame that didn’t feel like a statement or a set of expectations. I miss when my skin was just skin, before it became a map of everywhere I’ve been and everything the world expects me to become.
I grew in experience as I did in companionship or shape. I learned how to communicate, both in my articulation and vernacular. I become aware of the heavy realities of faraway politics and the cold facts of internal anatomy. I’ve learned the mechanics of love and the devastation of war. I’ve tasted what it’s like to love, and even more invigorating, I’ve felt the warmth of being truly received.
I am aware this version of me is more capable, more weathered, and entirely necessary. So, do not mistake my grief for a dislike of who I’ve become. I don’t regret the shifts I’ve made or the ways I’ve forced myself to grow. Quite frankly, I prefer the woman I am now to any versions of myself I left behind. Yet, I often find myself getting caught up in the “ghosts” of my previous versions. It’s strange to realize you’ve abandoned parts of yourself without even saying goodbye.
We should not make the mistake of looking at our past selves with embarrassment or purely through the lens of “learning lessons.” If our earlier versions are the ones who carried us to this moment, don’t they deserve a bit of a wake? That version of you, the one who was naive, the one who stayed in that friendship too long, the one who didn’t know then what you know now — they are the reason you’re standing here.
I’ve learned that growing up is a beautiful, brutal process of constant death and rebirth. It’s okay to miss the person you used to be, even if you know you love the someone you’re becoming.