There's no meal train. No condolence card. No casseroles. No flowers.
Because the thing that died wasn't a person. It was a version of your life. A version of yourself. Time you didn't get back. Things you yearned for that will never come to be.
And because it didn't come with a funeral, you probably never let yourself call it grief.
In this episode, Alyssa goes into the kind of loss that doesn't get acknowledged — the chapter of your life you never got to have, the relationship that turned out to be something completely different than what you were promised, the version of yourself that existed before the trauma. She shares her own grief around her early twenties — getting pregnant at 21, skipping an entire chapter of life that most people get, and now at 37, doing the self-discovery work she never got to do back then. And she's very clear: loving her son and grieving that lost chapter are not competing emotions. Both can be true at the same time.
She also gets into loneliness — not just the obvious kind, but the kind that makes no sense because you're surrounded by people who love you and still feel completely unseen. And the third kind almost nobody names: the disconnection from yourself.
In this episode:
The takeaway: This week, name one loss that you've never let yourself call grief because it wasn't a death. Say it out loud or write it down. Notice what happens in your body when you actually call it what it is. And if you want to go further, name one of the secondary losses that came with it — the thing that snuck up on you later, the thing nobody thought to acknowledge. It doesn't need to be the worst thing that ever happened to you to be real. If it mattered and now it's gone, it counts.
Chapters
00:07 The grief that doesn't come with a funeral
02:34 The losses that don't get a casserole — and why we don't call them grief
05:15 The five stages of grief — and what we know now that changes everything
09:30 Alyssa's grief: spending most of her life being who other people needed her to be
11:18 The loss of her early twenties — and why loving her son and grieving that chapter aren't opposites
13:11 Gratitude and grief can exist at the same time
16:03 How grief shows up as a complex web of emotions at once
22:30 Secondary loss — everything you lose that's attached to the main loss
25:29 Why grief hits in waves — and why \"I should be over this by now\" is never true
30:11 Loneliness and grief — why they almost always arrive together
31:40 The three types of loneliness
34:35 Examples of grief that don't look like grief
41:08 None of these have to be the worst thing that's ever happened to you to be valid
41:59 Your practice for this week
44:03 You don't have to make it mean something yet
46:30 It's not letting the loss get the final word
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