For thirteen years I called it failure. This week I finally understood what it actually was.

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I disappeared for 15 years. I’m just about waking up again. Text and Photo by Alek Martin.

I want to be honest with you before we go any further.

Most people who write about grief have already processed it. They write from a place of resolution. Of having come through. Of looking back at the darkness from somewhere safer.

I’m not there yet.

I am fifty-three years old. I have spent three decades trying to understand why I kept making the same choices. Why I kept losing myself in other people. Why no matter how much I understood — and I understood a lot — something always pulled me back under.

It took me until this week — this specific week — to finally name it properly.

Unprocessed grief.

Not the grief of a funeral. Not the kind with a beginning and an end and people bringing food to your door. The other kind. The kind that has no ceremony. No permission.…