After loss, privacy is often misread.
When you stop sharing as much, when you answer fewer questions, when you no longer volunteer details, people assume something has shut down. They call it distance. Withdrawal. Being closed off.
But privacy and closedness are not the same thing.
Privacy is intentional.
Closedness is defensive.
Privacy is about containment.
Closedness is about avoidance.
The difference matters.
Being private does not mean there is nothing happening inside. It means there is more happening than can safely be shared.
After loss, the internal landscape changes. There is more to hold, more to manage, more that requires care. Not everything fits into conversation. Not everything benefits from being spoken aloud.
Privacy becomes a way of staying intact.
It looks like choosing who gets access and who does not.
It looks like offering less context.
It looks like declining to explain yourself when explanation would cost too much.
This is often mistaken for being closed.
But being closed is different.
Closedness is about refusal.
It’s about pushing away feeling, not protecting it.
It’s about sealing something off because it is too threatening to approach.
Privacy, by contrast, is porous.
There are still places where connection happens.
Still people who are allowed closer.
Still moments of openness that are chosen, not demanded.
The boundary is not around feeling.
It’s around exposure.
After loss, exposure can be exhausting.
People want updates.
They want meaning.
They want signs of progress.
Privacy says: not everything is for public consumption.
This can feel uncomfortable for others. It disrupts the usual social exchange, where sharing is equated with honesty and openness is equated with health.
But privacy is not dishonesty.
It is discernment.
It’s knowing when speaking will clarify and when it will distort.
When sharing will connect and when it will drain.
Being private often means letting others fill in the gaps incorrectly.
They may assume you’re fine.
Or that you’re struggling more than you are.
Or that you’re pulling away.
Correcting those assumptions would require more exposure. More explanation. More energy.
Sometimes privacy means letting the misunderstanding stand.
This, too, gets labeled as being closed.
But what looks like closedness from the outside is often a form of care on the inside.
Care for your nervous system.
Care for what remains fragile.
Care for the parts of grief that do not benefit from translation.
Being closed cuts you off from feeling.
Being private keeps you connected to it.
Privacy allows grief to exist without performance.
Without being shaped for comprehension.
Without being made palatable.
It’s not a permanent state.
It shifts as capacity shifts.
Some days there is room to share.
Some days there isn’t.
Privacy honors that fluctuation.
Closedness does not.
So if you find yourself speaking less, explaining less, offering fewer pieces of yourself, it may not be because you’ve shut down.
It may be because you’re still very much present.
Just more careful about what you expose.
