the grief of becoming

when i first moved to Vancouver i kept grieving a life that technically still existed, just without me in it. and that was the strange part. it’s not like anything dramatic had happened to the life i had left behind. all my friends were still there. the roads were all still the same. my favourite gas station convenient store still had the sweet treat i would go get myself after a rough day. all the people i knew were still there going about life in the exact same way, having the same kind of evenings, making plans in the same group chats, living inside the ordinary rhythm i had known as well as the rhythm of my own heartbeat. the life hadn’t disappeared. it had simply continued; without me. and for some reason, that almost made it harder.

i guess when you move abroad, people have this expectation that you will miss home in a simple way. the food, the weather, your family, your friends, the familiar things. and of course, sometimes you do miss those things. but the grief i felt was much stranger than that. i was not only missing a place. i was grieving the fact that i would never live that exact life again.

the version of me who had belonged to that life still felt close enough to reach for. she had been there only a few months earlier. she knew where to go on a friday night. she knew who would be free for coffee. she knew the roads without looking them up. she had people who understood the context without needing the whole story. she moved through a life that had been built over years, so quietly and gradually that i had not realized how much it was holding me until i left.

and then suddenly i was in Vancouver, trying to build a new life from scratch, and the old one became almost unbearably vivid. not because i wanted to undo my choice. not because i thought i had made a mistake. but because i understood, maybe for the first time, that becoming always involves an ending. even when the new life is good. even when you chose it. even when it is taking you somewhere you needed to go. there is still grief in knowing that a version of your life is over, and you only got to understand how much you loved it after you left.

there is a kind of grief that has no funeral because nothing technically died. to be honest with you, that is what makes it so difficult to explain. when someone dies, the world understands that you are grieving. there are rituals, condolences, casseroles, flowers, a social language for the fact that something irreversible has happened. but when a life changes shape, when you move away, graduate, leave a relationship, change cities, outgrow a friendship, become a different version of yourself, there is often no clear moment where anyone says: this is a loss too.

the people are alive. the city is still there. the group chat still exists. the streets have not disappeared. the old life continues somewhere, which makes the grief feel almost unreasonable. what exactly are you mourning if everything you left behind is still technically available?

but that is the thing. it is not available in the same way. you can visit. you can call. you can go back for a few weeks and sit in the old rooms and laugh with the same people and remember how it used to feel. but you are not inside it anymore. you are no longer part of the daily rhythm. you no longer know every small update as it happens. you no longer belong to the life in the same effortless way. your absence has become part of its structure.

one of the strangest griefs is realising that a life can continue without you and still no longer be yours.

i think that is what i was mourning that first year. not home exactly. not even the people exactly, though of course i missed them (yes you mom, if you’re reading this). i was mourning the ordinary access i once had to a version of my own life. the casualness of it. the way belonging had existed before i knew to call it belonging. the way i could move through a day without building the whole thing from the ground up.

and there is something humbling about that, because you realise how much of a life is not made of the dramatic things. it is made of small permissions. knowing who to text. knowing where to go. knowing what sunday feels like. knowing the background noise. knowing which version of yourself people expect to meet and, for better or worse, being able to relax into her. when you leave, you lose that ease, and even if what you gain is beautiful, the loss is still real.

Heraclitus is often associated with the idea that you cannot step into the same river twice. the river has changed, and so have you. i used to understand that as a clever little philosophy sentence, one of those things people quote when they want to sound calm about change. but i think i understand it differently now, because the heartbreaking part is not only that the river changes. it is that you do too.

you can go back to a place. you can walk the same streets. you can sit with the same people. you can order the same drink at the same place and tell yourself that nothing has moved. but the life itself has already shifted. the people have had days without you. the city has kept going. the inside jokes have evolved. the version of you who once belonged there without thinking has become, quietly, historical.

and even if everyone welcomes you back, even if nothing looks dramatically different, you know. some part of you knows that returning is not the same as re-entering. you can go back to a place, but you cannot go back to a time.

i think that is one of the central heartbreaks of becoming. we imagine change as forward motion, but we forget that forward motion creates distance. every new self is also a little farther away from an old one. every life you enter makes another life less reachable. every yes is also, somewhere, a goodbye. that does not mean the yes was wrong. it just means time is real.

and maybe that is what i found so hard about my first year abroad. i was not only adjusting to Vancouver. i was adjusting to the irreversible nature of time. i was learning that my old life was not paused somewhere waiting for me to return to it unchanged. it was moving too. everyone was moving. everything was moving. i had stepped out of one river and into another, and both had already changed by the time i looked back.

anthropologists have written about liminality as the threshold stage in a rite of passage: the strange middle place where you have left one identity but have not yet fully entered the next one. that is exactly what my first year in Vancouver felt like. liminal. not quite home, not quite away. not quite the girl i had been, not yet the woman i was becoming. i was no longer inside the old life, but the new one had not fully received me yet. i had an address, but not a sense of belonging. i had made the brave choice, but not yet built the life that would make the choice feel settled.

i think people underestimate how strange that middle is. we love the before-and-after story. the leaving and the becoming. the old life and the new one. the girl who was scared and the woman who is now glowing in a different city with better coffee and a more emotionally coherent wardrobe. we love transformation once it can be narrated cleanly.

but the middle is not clean. the middle is crying in the shower. the middle is not knowing what to do on a saturday. the middle is refreshing your phone because everyone you love is asleep in a different time zone. the middle is feeling guilty for being sad because this is what you wanted. the middle is realising you cannot go back, but you also have not yet arrived.

and maybe that is why the grief of becoming is so particular. you are not only mourning what you left. you are also waiting for the new life to become real enough to hold you. there is a gap between the decision and the life that grows from it, and inside that gap, you can feel strangely untethered.

i think that is where i was for a long time. suspended between selves. old life behind me, new life not yet solid under my feet. and in that suspension, every memory of the life i left became sharper. not because it was perfect, but because it was known. the old life had texture. the new one had possibility, and possibility, for all its beauty, is not the same as being held.

we talk about becoming as if it is a clean upgrade. we talk about growth, reinvention, self-actualisation, healing, stepping into your power, becoming the woman you were always meant to be. and of course, there is truth there. becoming can be beautiful. it can be freeing. it can be the thing that saves you from staying too long inside a life that no longer fits.

but i think we make becoming sound too painless. we make it sound like a before-and-after photo, when often it feels more like packing up a room you loved before you were ready to leave. it feels like folding clothes that still smell like a version of yourself you cannot become again. it feels like deleting an address from autofill (to me this was one of the most painful things to do). it feels like realising a routine is over not because you hated it, but because time moved.

becoming is not only addition. it is also loss. you become more honest, and you lose the ease of pretending. you become more independent, and you lose the comfort of being held by old structures. you become more yourself, and you lose the social safety of being who people expected. you choose the life that expands you, and you lose access to the life that once made you feel fluent. that does not make the new life less meaningful. it just makes the process more human.

i think of this when people call someone brave for starting over. and maybe they are brave. maybe moving cities, leaving home, ending the relationship, changing the dream, becoming more honest, is brave. but sometimes being called brave can flatten the private cost of it. from the outside, becoming can look like a beautiful myth. from the inside, it can feel like grief with better lighting.

history has always done this to women especially. it turns becoming into iconography. Cleopatra becomes less a person than a symbol: queen, seductress, strategist, myth, warning, fantasy. the actual woman gets buried under the meanings people need her to carry. we do this in smaller ways too. we see the woman who left, the woman who moved, the woman who rebuilt, the woman who became, and we turn her into a story about courage. but inside that story, there is often a quieter human truth: she had to lose something to become visible in that new way.

maybe that is why i am suspicious of the clean becoming narrative. it can make the old self look like something we simply shed. but old selves are not always cages. sometimes they were homes. sometimes they protected us. sometimes they carried us as far as they could. sometimes the life we outgrow was still a life we loved, and it is okay to grieve that.

i think this is the sentence i needed most then: grief is not always evidence that you chose wrong. sometimes it is evidence that what you left mattered.

i wish someone had told me that more clearly, because when you choose a new life and then find yourself mourning the old one, it can feel like a contradiction. you start interrogating yourself. if this was the right choice, why am i sad? if i wanted this, why do i miss that? if i am becoming someone more honest, why do i keep aching for the version of me who lived more easily inside the old life?

but maybe grief and rightness can coexist. maybe you can know something needed to change and still miss what it felt like before it changed. maybe you can love the life you chose and still mourn the life that choosing ended. maybe you can be grateful for where you are and still feel a pang when you remember who you were in the place before.

that does not make you ungrateful. it makes you someone who loved your life while you were in it.

i think we are too quick to make grief mean regret. but grief is often just love after the shape has changed. it is the feeling that remains when something mattered and is no longer available in the way it once was. and if that is true, then grieving an old life does not mean the new one is wrong. it means the old one was real.

and maybe that is why the grief can be so deep. because you are not mourning a mistake. you are mourning a chapter that held you, even if you could not stay there.

there is a strange pressure, when you become someone new, to make the old version of yourself wrong. it makes the story easier. i was lost, now i am found. i was small, now i am brave. i was living the wrong life, now i am living the right one. i was asleep, now i am awake. it is comforting because it gives change a moral shape. it lets you believe everything you left was only an obstacle.

but i do not think that is always true. the old self was not stupid for loving what she loved. she was not wrong for belonging where she belonged. she was not less evolved because she did not yet know what would come next. she was a person living inside the knowledge she had, with the desires she had, in the life that had formed around her.

and maybe that life was good.

maybe that is the part that makes leaving so hard. not every old life is bad. not every outgrown self is a villain. sometimes you outgrow something that once fit beautifully. sometimes you leave not because the life failed you, but because you changed. and when that happens, there is no clean enemy. there is no dramatic reason to point to. there is just the quiet ache of knowing that something can be good and still no longer be yours.

i think about the version of me who lived that old life, and i feel tenderness for her now. not embarrassment. not superiority. tenderness. she knew how to be there. she had rituals i no longer have. she had closeness i did not know to value properly. she had a kind of ease i may never experience in exactly the same way again.

and she gave me something. she gave me history. she gave me context. she gave me proof that i could belong somewhere. she gave me memories i still return to when i need to remember that my life has held sweetness before and will hold it again. i do not need to become her again to love her.

one of the hardest parts of moving away is watching the old life develop a future without you. at first, you think you are only leaving the present. the city as you knew it. the people as they were. the routine as it existed. but then time starts to reveal the deeper loss: you are also leaving the future you would have had there.

the dinners you would have gone to. the friendships that would have deepened through proximity. the casual plans you would have said yes to because they required no effort. the ordinary days that would have accumulated into a life. the version of yourself who would have been shaped by staying. that future keeps unfolding somewhere, just without you in it.

and maybe that is its own kind of grief. not only missing what was, but missing what might have continued. not in a dramatic alternate-universe way, necessarily. just in the small everyday way. if i had stayed, what would my tuesdays have looked like? who would i have become through repetition? what friendships would have grown simply because i was there? what version of me did i leave unlived?

i do not think this means we should spend our lives haunted by every path not taken. that sounds exhausting and also very on brand for me, unfortunately. but i do think there is something honest about admitting that every choice creates ghost lives. not better lives, necessarily. not lives we should have chosen. just lives that are no longer available because we chose this one.

and sometimes those ghost lives brush against you. a photo. a message. a memory. a friend casually mentioning something you were not there for. a street you can picture so clearly it feels offensive that you are not standing on it. suddenly you are aware, again, that life continued. not cruelly. just naturally. life moves on, and that is the whole heartbreak.

for a while, i think i wanted the grief to go away because i thought it meant i had not fully arrived. i thought that if Vancouver became home, the old life would stop aching. i thought that once i made friends, found routines, built a life, became more myself, the grief would dissolve like proof that the transition had worked.

and some of it did soften. of course it did. new lives do become real. the unfamiliar does become familiar. the city that once felt like a question can slowly become a place that knows your footsteps. but i do not think the grief disappears completely. i think it changes texture.

it stops being a wound and becomes a kind of reverence. you stop wanting the old life back in the same way. you stop asking it to become available again. you stop comparing every new thing to what you lost. but you still carry the knowledge that a whole version of your life existed, and mattered, and ended.

maybe that is maturity. not moving on in the sense of forgetting, but learning how to let old lives remain loved without needing to live inside them again. because the grief taught me something i do not think excitement could have taught me on its own. it taught me that i had been held. it taught me that ordinary days become precious after they are gone. it taught me that belonging is something we often only recognize when we lose its ease. it taught me that becoming is not just about chasing the next version of yourself, but about honouring the versions that carried you here.

and maybe that is the gentlest way to think about old selves. not as failed drafts, but as companions. as earlier homes. as people we once had to be in order to survive, belong, love, learn, leave.

with time, Vancouver did become a life. not all at once. not in a movie way. not with one perfect montage of healing and belonging. but slowly, through repetition. a street becoming familiar. a grocery store becoming mine. a walk becoming a ritual. a friend becoming someone i could text without explaining the whole emotional preface first. a city becoming less like a backdrop and more like a place that held my actual days. gosh i even lime scoot to work now without a map. i just move with the rhythm of the city.

and in that new life, i became someone i recognized. not because i stopped loving the old one. not because the old self disappeared. not because i transcended grief and became some enlightened woman who only looks forward. absolutely not. i remain deeply capable of romanticising the past and making myself emotional over a song in a grocery store. but because the grief made room for a more honest kind of gratitude.

i can love the life i left without needing it back. i can miss who i was there without wanting to become her again. i can admit that becoming cost me something without turning that cost into regret.

that, i think, is the truth i keep coming back to. becoming is not a clean replacement. it is not old life bad, new life good. it is not the past as a mistake and the future as redemption. it is more tender than that. more complicated. more human.

the old life was real. the new life is real. the grief is real. the growth is real. all of it can be true.

maybe that is what no one tells you about becoming. that it can feel like expansion and mourning at the same time. that the life you choose can still break your heart a little. that moving forward does not mean you never look back. it means you learn how to look back with love, without asking time to reverse itself.

maybe the work is not to stop missing the old life. maybe the work is to let it be loved without asking it to become available again. because becoming does not mean the old life meant nothing. sometimes it means it meant enough to hurt when you outgrew it.

xoxo
kiki

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