There’s a grief that doesn’t announce itself loudly. It comes in quiet waves, often when you’re doing something ordinary – folding laundry, locking the front door, hearing someone say “I’m proud of you” in a way that sounds like they mean it. That’s when it hits. The realization that you were never truly loved in the place you once called home.

Not for who you were when no one was watching. Not for the messiness or the softness or the way your voice shook when you were scared. You were loved when you were agreeable. When you were useful. When you tucked your needs behind your back and smiled like it didn’t ache.

It’s not that they said it outright. It’s that the conditions were always there, written in the silence between slammed doors and long pauses at dinner tables. You learned early that love had rules. That your belonging was a reward, not a right.

And even now, as you build something new, as you slowly unlearn the shape your body held to be acceptable, there’s a grief. Not just for what happened – but for all the ways you molded yourself into a version of you they could stand. A version that survived, yes, but went unseen.

This kind of grief doesn’t need fixing. It needs witnessing. It needs gentleness. It needs the quiet permission to say, “I wasn’t hard to love. They just didn’t know how to love someone real.”