Grief is a funny emotion. There's no handbook for it, and even when you think you're done, it can come back with a vengeance when you're least expecting it. It also comes in every size - from the loss of a loved one all the way down to being bummed that your team didn't make the championship. But the strangest type of grief, and probably the hardest for me to process, is grief for a future that could or should have been.
This kind of grief is the hardest to describe, and therefore the hardest to discuss without feeling like a melancholy drama queen. It's opportunity cost that shouldn't even be a consideration - but it is.
It's grief for a marriage that failed. Not because I missed the marriage, but because of the years spent supporting someone else's dreams while becoming increasingly isolated in whatever random city or town we happened to call home that year. It's grief for a future I might have had with more direction as a teenager - someone to help me see what was possible beyond my small New Hampshire town. It's grief for connections that shouldn't have faded but did, because being so mentally depleted made keeping relationships going feel like a Herculean task. It's grief for never quite fitting into southern culture - largely shaped by faith, family, and football, none of which I closely identify with. It's grief for poor decisions, expensive financial mistakes, or wishing that I had done something ever so slightly differently.
It's grief for all the things Hallmark doesn't make a greeting card for. But grief for things that are profoundly real, and that have shaped who I am. When I talk to others about this grief, I am reminded that this is a shared human experience. Most people grieve things - serious or benign - and yet most of us do it silently.
Twenty years after I started working - we'll get to the jobs that got me here in some future essay - I've also grieved career choices I made - or didn't make - out of fear and the need for stability over novelty. I've forged my own path in a lot of ways, but those decisions have had real costs, and I'm still reckoning with some of them.
Some would say grieving a future that didn't happen is a waste of time and energy. They're probably right. But that doesn't make it easy. I'm also aware that my life is one that someone in a developing country - or honestly, someone within the borders of my own state - couldn't imagine having. Because my life is good. It's actually really good. I'm healthy, I have a home, I have clean sheets and food to eat. I have a loving husband and I'm a mom to the cutest baby I've ever seen. Things aren't bad. They're really not. And grief hasn't taken over my thoughts. But it's a strange thing to sit with: the simultaneous awareness that your life is objectively good and the very human feeling of wanting something that didn't happen to have happened differently.
That's the grief with no name. And I think it deserves to be talked about more.