The Strange Grief of Outgrowing Your Own Life

There’s a kind of grief we don’t talk about very much because, frankly, it can sound a little ungrateful.

Nothing terrible has happened. No one has died. There’s been no diagnosis, no catastrophe, no dramatic ending. Your life may look perfectly fine from the outside. It may even be a life you worked very hard to create.

And yet, something doesn’t fit anymore.

At 63, I’m increasingly aware of how strange it is to look at parts of a life you deliberately chose and realize you might not choose them again. Not because they were mistakes. They weren’t. They belonged to another time, and in some cases, another version of me.

I suspect a lot of women reach this point and don’t quite know what to call it.

We become restless in places where we once felt settled. Friendships that sustained us for years begin to feel oddly unsatisfying. Things we used to look forward to don’t hold quite the same appeal. Even our homes, our clothes, our routines can start to feel like remnants of someone we remember being rather than expressions of who we are now. There is sadness in that. Not because those things were wrong, but because they were once right.

When a Good Life Stops Feeling Like Your Life

I think this is what makes this particular kind of grief so confusing. We know how to recognize loss when something is taken from us. It is much harder to recognize loss when we are the ones moving away from something.

You can love people and realize you no longer feel entirely yourself around them. You can be grateful for a home and suddenly find yourself imagining living somewhere completely different. You can look at a closet full of perfectly good clothes and wonder why so few of them feel like you anymore. You can achieve something you once desperately wanted and discover you have absolutely no desire to keep proving yourself in that particular way. None of this requires a villain. It doesn’t even require a reason you could satisfactorily explain to someone else.

Sometimes you have simply changed.

And by this age, most of us have changed more than once. I know I have. The woman I was at 30 would probably be baffled by some of the things I care about now, and even more baffled by the things I no longer care about at all.

The Roles We Played Well

The hardest things to outgrow may be the roles we have played successfully: The competent one. The accommodating one. The person everyone calls. The wife. The mother. The executive. The caretaker. The peacemaker. The woman who can handle anything…

There’s a certain satisfaction in being capable. People rely on you. You get things done. You become very good at anticipating what everyone needs, solving problems and carrying on. The trouble is that after enough years, you can forget to ask whether you still want the job. Not the literal job, the internal one.

Women are particularly good at staying loyal to earlier versions of themselves. We keep maintaining things long after we have stopped wanting them because we confuse longevity with obligation.

But something having mattered for 20 years does not mean it must matter for 20 more, and I find that idea enormously freeing.

What Happens Before You Know What’s Next?

Recognizing what no longer fits is one thing. Knowing what should replace it is another. That’s the part I find more difficult.

I like answers, plans, and knowing where I’m going. But there are periods in life when the honest answer is simply: I don’t know yet.

The old friendships may have become less central, but the new ones haven’t appeared. An ambition has faded, but the next fascination hasn’t revealed itself. You know you want something different, but if someone asks exactly what that looks like, you don’t have a particularly good answer. I used to think that meant I needed to figure things out faster, but I don’t anymore. Perhaps there’s supposed to be some empty space between who we have been and who we are becoming.

We spend so much of our younger lives constructing an identity. We choose careers, partners, homes and communities. We accumulate responsibilities, relationships and possessions until eventually we have built something recognizable as our life. Then one day we look around and realize that some of what we built belongs to a woman we no longer are. I think that realization deserves a little grief. Not regret. Grief.

We can honor the woman who wanted those things without requiring ourselves to keep wanting them. We can be grateful for a chapter and still know, quite clearly, that we have finished reading it. Maybe that’s one of the privileges of getting older.

We’re allowed to change our minds, stop maintaining identities simply because other people have grown accustomed to them, and leave some rooms without knowing exactly which one we’ll enter next. Sometimes nothing is wrong with your life; you’ve simply become too large for the life that once contained you.

This willingness to release identities that no longer fit is at the heart of what I explore in my book, The Sovereign Self: the idea that becoming more fully ourselves sometimes requires letting go of who we have been.

Questions for You:

Is there a part of your life that still looks perfectly fine from the outside but no longer feels like it belongs to you? Are you holding on to a friendship, role, routine, or identity because you still want it, or because it has simply been part of your life for a long time? What might become possible if you allowed yourself not to know what comes next?