Who Am I Now? Finding Yourself After Loss
One of the most disorienting parts of grief is not just losing someone you love — it is losing the version of yourself that existed alongside them. Your roles change. Your sense of purpose shifts. The questions get bigger and harder to answer. In Episode 6 of the GRIEF Ladies Podcast, Karyn and Kelly close out the G.R.I.E.F. framework with Finding — the F — and what it actually means to search for yourself again after loss.
Why does grief make you question who you are?
So much of our identity is quietly built around the people in our lives. When someone dies, it is not just their presence that disappears — it is the roles you played together, the decisions you made as a unit, the parts of yourself that only existed in relation to them. Many grieving people describe feeling like they are starting over, like their life was one way and then in an instant looked completely different.
Kelly describes Finding as the intersection of three things: making sense of what happened, discovering what benefits — however small — have emerged from the experience, and reconstructing your identity. Who am I now? Where do I want to go? These are not questions with quick answers, and Karyn points out that in early grief, most people do not yet have the capacity to answer them at all. That is normal. Finding tends to come after the acute weight of early grief has had some time to settle.
Meaning-making — including sense-making, benefit-finding, and identity reconstruction — is one of the most well-supported frameworks in contemporary grief research. Studies show that people who are able to find some meaning in their loss over time report lower levels of grief-related distress and greater long-term well-being. (Sources: Park, C.L. — meaning-making model; bereavement and post-traumatic growth literature)
What Karyn and Kelly are clear about: you do not have to force meaning. And you do not have to find it on a timeline. But staying curious about the question — who am I now, and who do I want to be? — is itself a form of progress.
Is it realistic to want to be happy again?
Karyn offers a reframe in this episode that is worth sitting with: happiness is not the goal. Not because happiness does not matter, but because it is fleeting and unreliable even in the best of times. Chasing happiness as a grief benchmark sets people up to feel like they are failing when the feeling does not hold.
What she focuses on instead is peace. Contentment. A sense of things feeling slightly more predictable, slightly more tolerable than yesterday. A client Kelly has carried with her since 2008 said it plainly: "I don't want to be happy. I just want to be neutral." Neutral meaning peaceful. Calm. Grounded. That, she said, felt sustainable in a way that happiness did not.
The episode closes with a story Karyn tells about a man who asked her, "What difference does it make?" — a question that can stop a grief counselor cold if you're not ready for it. Her answer is one of the most honest and useful things in this episode, and it is worth hearing in her own words.
Listen to Karyn answer that question — and hear what she and Kelly believe is possible when you actually do the work: Listen to Episode 6 of the GRIEF Ladies Podcast → LINK: https://youtu.be/qd4XfdkR14o?si=U7Kn_XzInnO8fTVW
Keep Reading
Is It Normal to Feel Angry, Guilty, and Resentful When You're Grieving? → LINK: https://youtu.be/x3BKKoWBPv4?si=yZ_iVe_io9kfsC6b — Episode 5 on the complex emotions that can keep you stuck.
What Is the G.R.I.E.F. Framework and How Does It Work? → LINK: https://youtu.be/_0ld4dnUT7I?si=65dD-m5k3n60cD3z— An overview of all five pillars: Grounding, Rebuilding, Interacting, Evolving, and Finding.
