Why Am I Grieving the Version of Myself I Used to Be?
The Pattern
You are looking at a photo from five or ten years ago. You feel a complicated wave. Tenderness toward her, embarrassment at her, and underneath, a small clean grief. She is gone. She is not in there anymore. The body she lived in is now your body, and you are someone else now. The grief surprises you. You did not know you were allowed to mourn yourself. You are allowed. The previous self was a real person. She had a particular way of laughing and a particular set of hopes and a particular way of being inside her own skin. She is not coming back. The not-coming-back is a loss, and your body has been carrying it without language.
Origins & Context
James Hollis, the Jungian analyst whose work focuses on the second half of life, names this experience the small deaths of becoming. Hollis writes that each transformation requires the death of the previous self, and that adults rarely give themselves permission to grieve these deaths because the culture frames growth as pure gain. The grief is not pathology. It is the missing ceremony for a death the culture refused to acknowledge.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes, in her work on the life-death-life cycle, names the necessity of mourning previous selves as part of staying alive to the present one. Estes notes that women in particular are often denied the mourning of their previous selves because the culture would prefer that they pretend the previous self was always the current one.
She is not coming back. The not-coming-back is a loss, and your body has been carrying it without language.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
You notice it in the photos. You scroll through old images and you find yourself missing her with a sharpness you cannot explain. You did not always like her. You did not always think she was making good choices. And still, there is a missing.
It shows up in the moments you catch yourself trying to be her again. You wear the old outfit. You return to the old neighborhood. You text the old friend. You feel a flicker of who you were and then you feel the gap, because the gestures do not bring her back. The gestures only sharpen the distance.
It shows up in the strange way you have started narrating your own life in the past tense. You say I used to. I was the kind of person who. You hear yourself doing it and you wonder when the present tense stopped being a comfortable place for you to live.
Named in the Literature As
The pattern is named in the literature as the Small Deaths of Becoming (James Hollis), the unmarked grief of previous selves dying as we transform. It is also named as the Life-Death-Life Cycle (Clarissa Pinkola Estes), the natural rhythm of inner selves rising and completing. Carl Jung's work on individuation describes the related concept of ego death as a necessary part of the second half of life.
Related entries in this library: Complex Grief, Adaptive Self vs Original Self, Healing Is Direction Not Destination.
Nikita's Note
The previous self is allowed to be mourned. She was a real person. She lived. She is gone now, and the gone-ness is not failure. It is the proof that you have lived enough to change.
The practice is small. Write her a letter. Tell her what you miss about her. Tell her what you do not miss. Tell her thank you for getting you here. Let her exist as a beloved past person, not as a haunting. The grief, given somewhere to live, stops surprising you in photos. It becomes the gentle tribute it was always trying to be.
From the work
She is not coming back. The not-coming-back is a loss, and your body has been carrying it without language.From When You're Ready, This Is How You Choose Yourself by Nikita DatarAbout this book
Related Concepts
More in The Pattern Atlas
See all in The Pattern Atlas →I wrote about this in When You're Ready, This Is How You Choose Yourself — available on Amazon.