The grief we don’t see

An invitation to a different conversation

Grief is often thought of as something clear-cut, something obvious. It is the loss of a loved one, the end of a relationship, the finality of what was. It is met with rituals, with recognition, with a collective understanding that some moments in life require pause, some moments require mourning. But grief is not always so tangible. Sometimes, it lingers in places we don’t expect, attached to things we never fully had. It lives in the spaces between what we thought would happen and what actually did.

Photo by Sandy Millar on Unsplash

This is a series about the grief we don’t see—the kinds of loss that doesn’t always invite sympathy or acknowledgment, the quiet mourning that happens in the waiting rooms of life. It is about the grief of friendships that fade as life paths diverge. The grief of dating in a world where love feels like something just out of reach. The grief of social infertility, of wanting children but never having the circumstances align to make it possible. The grief of watching others move through milestones you once assumed would be part of your own story. The grief of a life that, in some small or profound way, does not look the way you imagined it would.

This is not a grief that arrives in a single moment. It is not the kind that is met with condolences or casseroles. It is the slow, cumulative grief of waiting. Of hope being stretched thinner and thinner. Of looking around and wondering if everyone else received a map you never had access to.

There is an unspoken hierarchy of loss in our culture. Some grief is met with collective mourning, with space and softness. Other grief is minimised, dismissed, or not acknowledged at all. A woman going through IVF is met with sympathy; a woman freezing her eggs is told she should feel lucky to have options. A woman grieving a miscarriage is comforted; a woman grieving that she never had the chance to try for a baby is met with well-meaning but empty reassurances that “it could still happen.” A breakup invites support, but the grief of never having had a significant relationship at all is rarely discussed. There is comfort for the grief that is visible. There is silence for the grief that is not.

This series is about breaking that silence.

Each piece will explore a different kind of invisible grief—grief that is often carried alone, grief that doesn’t have a clear name or socially accepted ritual, grief that is sometimes hard to even recognise in ourselves. We will look at the shifting nature of friendship and what happens when life paths diverge. The ways in which dating in an era of ambiguity leads to repeated, unspoken loss. The experience of social infertility and the challenge of mourning something that never fully existed. The reality of waiting—not just for love, or children, or certainty, but for clarity on what life will be when the things we expected don’t materialise.

If the Waiting Room is about anything, it is about making space for the in-between—for the moments that don’t fit neatly into traditional narratives, for the questions we sit with longer than we’d like, for the transitions that don’t come with clear instructions. This series will not be about fixing grief or finding perfect resolutions. It will be about naming it. Sitting with it. Making space for it. And, perhaps, understanding that even the grief we carry alone deserves to be seen.

Because grief is not just about what we have lost. It is also about what never came to be. And that, too, is worth mourning.

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