I Didn’t Know I Was Grieving

Starting this new chapter took time to settle into. It took even longer to figure out who I was outside of my old life. The strange part is that, even while I was living that life, I did not really know who I was.

My identity had become intertwined with my work. Who I was became what I did, and the sense of purpose I gained came largely from the job. That was especially true during my 20 years in the military.

I joined when I was 18. At that age, I did not have a clear sense of who I was or what I wanted my life to mean. Putting on a uniform gave me some of that direction. It gave me structure, belonging, responsibility, and a sense that I had value. I surrendered some of my individuality to conformity because, at the time, conformity gave me something I needed.

I worked hard. I tried to do well. I built a life around that identity.

Then I left.

Retirement did not immediately feel like freedom. It felt like losing something I had spent most of my life building. The adjustment took longer than I expected because I was not simply leaving a job. I was leaving a way of life.

What made it more complicated was that I had already been unhappy within that life. I had been unhappy with the work and with parts of the culture. Yet after I left, I was still unhappy.

For a while, I could not understand that contradiction.

How could I grieve something I had wanted to leave?

Eventually, I began to understand that grief does not require us to want something back.

I missed the stability. I missed knowing where I fit. I missed having people around me who understood the environment because they were living it too. The job could be difficult, but the people were good. I was taken care of. I was looked after. I had a small group of friends, which suited me because I have always been selective about the people I let close.

Civilian life was different.

The skills I had developed did not always translate neatly into my new environment. Some of the behaviours that had been useful in the military did not fit particularly well outside of it. I had spent years learning how to function within one system, and suddenly I was expected to understand another.

There was also a strange sense of impermanence.

When you leave a structured environment, you can discover how quickly life moves on without you. People have their own responsibilities, relationships, careers, and priorities. You are no longer automatically part of the system. You are not necessarily seen, remembered, or thought about in the same way.

I had exchanged one lifestyle for another, but I had not yet figured out how to belong in the new one.

And I was starting over at 40.

That brought its own grief.

There was grief in losing the role I had occupied. Grief in losing the community around it. Grief in losing the certainty of knowing what was expected of me. And there was grief in realizing that the identity I had built was not necessarily the identity I wanted to carry forward.

It took me six years to begin figuring that out.

Six years of different jobs, different environments, and different attempts to understand where I fit. Eventually, I had to take my own life apart and look at it differently.

I had to separate what I wanted to keep from what I wanted to leave behind.

There were things from that life that I valued. There were things I did not want to carry with me. There were parts of myself that had developed because of that environment that I wanted to preserve, and others that I needed to reconsider.

I began taking the best from both piles.

Not recreating my old life. Not rejecting it completely either.

Building something of my own.

But before I could do that, I had to acknowledge that I was grieving.

That realization has changed the way I think about loss.

We often associate grief with things we loved. A person dies. A relationship ends. A home is lost. A diagnosis changes the future we imagined.

But sometimes we grieve things that were complicated.

We can grieve a life we were unhappy living.

We can grieve a role we no longer wanted.

We can grieve a community that frustrated us.

We can grieve an identity that no longer fits.

Leaving does not erase attachment. And choosing change does not prevent loss.

I have often wondered whether this experience is common among veterans. I wonder what happens when someone leaves voluntarily compared with someone who is dismissed from service or forced to leave before they are ready.

What happens when the decision to leave is not yours?

What happens when you still love the life you are being asked to leave?

There may be a different kind of grief in that experience. The loss is not only about what is gone. It can also involve the loss of choice, identity, belonging, and the future a person believed they were going to have.

I do not have all the answers to those questions.

What I know is that leaving one life and beginning another required me to grieve before I could rebuild.

I had to make room for the person I had been, the person I was becoming, and the parts of myself that had been waiting for me to decide who I wanted to be.

Perhaps that is one of the things loss asks of us.

Not simply to let go, but to look carefully at what remains and decide what we want to carry forward.