People sometimes ask if you’re okay after a loss, and for a long time I found myself saying, “I think I’m doing fine.”
It was a strange answer then, and perhaps it still is. Because “fine” was never the same as being whole. It didn’t mean untouched. It didn’t mean life had returned to what it was. It meant I was learning to exist in a reality I had never imagined I would have to navigate.
I lost my twin.
When I first wrote about her loss, I was at the beginning of my grief. I was still trying to understand. Time has given me a different perspective. It hasn’t restored why and how what was taken from me, but it has changed my relationship with loss and my relationship with myself.
There are some losses that alter the landscape of your life, and then there are losses that alter the landscape of who you are. Losing a twin is both.
What I understand differently now is that being changed by loss does not mean being permanently trapped in the moment of that loss. Grief accompanied me. It was something invisible to others but constantly present to me. But life continues. Not as it was, but it continues.
I still live with tinnitus – a reminder of the stress, of the loss. There are still days when my mind isn’t a particularly good place to be. The constant noise, mental fatigue and emotional weight continue to shape how I am able to move through the world.
Some days I function well. Other days, simple things demand more of me. The difference now is that I understand myself better. I have become more aware of my limits, and that’s okay even if others struggle with my challenges.
Stepping back is not giving up. It is knowing yourself well enough to recognise when you have reached your limit.
Writing has helped teach me that.
It remains the place where I recognise myself most clearly. It gives me somewhere to put thoughts that otherwise remain tangled. It allows me to explore things I may never be able to explain properly in conversation.
At first, I think I wrote partly to understand what was happening to me. Now I write from a place of having lived with it.
That distinction matters.
I know now that resilience isn’t about returning to the person you were before life changed. Growth, I have discovered, isn’t always about becoming stronger. Sometimes it is about becoming more honest. More accepting of your limitations. More willing to recognise what matters and less willing to spend yourself on things that don’t.
It’s understanding that difficult days don’t invalidate good ones. And that carrying someone with you is not the same as being unable to move forward.
I still carry my twin. I always will. But carrying someone doesn’t mean standing still. My twin is part of my history, part of my identity. Grief hasn’t disappeared; it has simply found its place within a much larger life.
At the beginning, so much of my energy went into learning how to live with what I had lost. Today, I am also learning to recognise what remains.
My ability to think. To write. To connect. To change. To find meaning in unexpected places. And to keep becoming someone I couldn't have become without “getting to know and understand me.”
I have known profound emotional loss and I've had to live with things I would never have chosen. There are parts of me that will always carry their mark.
Wholeness includes the scars. It can also include grief and change. It can even include a version of yourself you never expected to meet.
I’ve had to reinvent myself countless times to survive.
And I still show up. Not because everything is fine.
But because showing up is what I have always done.
