"It is not death that a man should fear,
but he should fear never beginning to live"
[Marcus Aurelius] 

We always think of grief as something that arrives with an earthquake, a sudden tragic loss, an unbearable news, the loud, violent ending of something dear to us.

We expect it to make noise. We expect tears.

These are all true, valid and real ways we mourn.

But! What about the grief that never makes a single sound? The grief that doesn't hit when the tragedy is unfolding, but comes long after the damage is already done?

When you're in the middle of a disaster, you're not grieving. You’re surviving. You’re numb to the pain because your only focus is to make it through the fire. But the true, terrifying grief only begins when the dust clears, the silence settles in and you look around only to realize that the worst casualty wasn't the situation.

The worst casualty was YOURSELF.

I'm not talking about the grief of losing a loved one, losing a job, or facing a heartbreak. I’m talking about an existential grief.. the grief of losing the person you could have lived as, the grief of realizing you will never truly find the answers to why you exist, or who you really were supposed to be.

You spend your youth burning with questions, longing to understand the meaning of this life. And then, somewhere along the way, that fire simply fades out. You don't get answers.. you just get exhausted. A quiet, terrifying numbness takes over you. You stop asking. You stop searching. You stop THINKING.

Yes, there are moments of joy. You laugh, you drink your tea, you go through the motions of your daily routine. But these moments don't matter anymore. They sit on the surface of your chest and vanish into nothingness ... because, deep down, you have accepted that this grief is your permanent reality. You stop looking for happiness because you realize you've already become a stranger to your own soul.

And that, dear reader, is the most tragic part of it all:

Nobody holds a funeral for the ghost of the person you never got to become.

There is no ceremony for the slow death of your own spirit, your own SELF. You just learn to adapt to the silence. You walk around with a hollow chest, carrying the weight of an unlived life.. until you don't even know what you're mourning anymore.. only that you betrayed your own existence, and the world simply kept moving on.