There’s a grief no one prepares you for – the grief of realizing you were never given the kind of love that makes you feel safe, and that you have to teach it to yourself from scratch.

It isn’t loud, dramatic, or the kind of grief people gather around with casseroles and sympathy cards. It’s ordinary. Almost invisible. It’s the ache of sitting in a kitchen at 10 p.m. realizing you forgot to eat again. It’s lying in bed and trying to convince yourself that you deserve rest, even when your body is buzzing with old alarms that never got shut off. It’s standing in front of a mirror and learning to look at yourself without flinching, without critiquing, without shame.

No one tells you that sometimes the hardest part of healing isn’t moving forward – it’s slowing down. It’s giving yourself what should have been second nature but never was. Safety. Nourishment. Comfort. Care.

The truth is, grief isn’t always about what you’ve lost. Sometimes it’s about what you never had to begin with. And that kind of grief lingers because it doesn’t come with closure- it comes with homework. With rewiring. With the quiet, daily labor of re-parenting yourself in ways you never thought you’d have to.

It looks like grocery lists scribbled with actual meals instead of skipped ones. It looks like naps without guilt. It looks like catching yourself mid-thought when you call yourself names and replacing it with something softer.

And over time, that grief shifts. It never vanishes, but it reshapes itself into proof – that even if you weren’t given safe love, you are capable of building it. That even if it wasn’t poured into you, you can pour it into yourself, drop by drop, until one day the grief of what you missed quietly becomes the foundation of what you’ve created.

Because sometimes the most radical act isn’t waiting for love to arrive – it’s learning to give it to yourself in ways that make you feel safe, whole, and finally, finally home.