John R. Miles

I want to be careful how I say this, because the grief of that is its own thing.

It never fully leaves.

But what I wasn't prepared for was what that loss did to the way I saw my own life.

When you lose someone that close,

someone who just a few days earlier was standing right next to you in the world, you stop being able to pretend.

The normal distractions stop working.

The routine that felt purposeful the week before suddenly feels like furniture you've been rearranging in a house you don't actually live in.

I started asking questions I'd been very successfully avoiding.

How much of this, the way I show up, the role I play, the version of myself I present every single day, how much of this was actually chosen?

And how much of it just accumulated?

Because it was easier, because it kept the peace, because somewhere along the way, I learned that being needed was safer than being known.

That was my spotlight moment.

It didn't fall from the sky.

It came from losing someone I loved,

And realizing that I had been so busy being useful, so busy being the person everyone else needed me to be,

that I became a stranger to myself.

And that's what I mean when I talk about being invisible.

And it doesn't happen dramatically.

It happens gradually.

The way a room gets dark when the sun goes down and you don't notice until you realize you can't see.