After loss, people often talk about getting back to normal.
They say it with care. With hope. Sometimes with relief in their voice, as if normal is a place you can return to if you just keep moving long enough.
But after certain losses, normal no longer exists in the way it once did.
Not because life itself has ended, but because the life you were living no longer exists in the same way. The world you lived in before doesn’t match the one you’re standing in now. The ground feels different. Even familiar things require more effort.
Wanting to go back makes sense. It’s human to reach for what felt familiar and safe. I did too.
But over time, I realized that going back wasn’t possible, and chasing it only added another layer of pain. Not because I was failing to heal, but because I was trying to fit myself into a version of life that no longer existed.
At first, I kept measuring myself against who I used to be. How much I could handle before. How easily I moved through days. How little effort ordinary things required. Every comparison carried frustration, even when I was doing everything I could just to survive.
That’s part of what makes the idea of normal so heavy. It carries an unspoken expectation that if enough time passes, you’ll return to a recognizable version of yourself. That grief is something you move through, not something that changes you.
But grief doesn’t just interrupt life. It changes how life feels from the inside.
What I can handle is different now. What once felt automatic requires more intention. That isn’t weakness. It’s adjustment to a reality that can’t be undone.
Even now, I sometimes look at photos from before my son died. Sometimes he isn’t even in them. And I find myself thinking, that’s when life was easy.
I know that isn’t entirely true. Life then had its own struggles. I wouldn’t have called it easy at the time.
But it didn’t take so much effort just to exist. Laughing came more easily. Being alive required less from me.
Normal changed, whether I wanted it to or not.
Over time, you don’t go back to normal. You learn how to live inside a new one.
That new normal can still ache, the way homesickness does. You can function, even laugh, and still feel the absence of what once was. Both can be true at the same time.
There was relief in letting go of the idea that I was supposed to get back to who I was before. When normal stopped being the goal, I wasn’t failing anymore. I was adapting.
I didn’t stop missing what I lost. I didn’t stop wishing the life before had stayed intact. But I stopped expecting myself to inhabit it again.
What replaced normal wasn’t peace or clarity.
It was permission.
Permission to move differently.
Permission to take longer.
Permission to live forward without pretending anything was restored.
Normal isn’t the goal because normal requires denial.
Living forward requires honesty.
And honesty means learning how to exist in a life that carries loss without asking it to disappear.
