eighteen months in and the grief doesn’t work the way I expected. I thought it would be loud and front-loaded. career gone, patients gone, the hiking trips I kept moving until I stopped moving them. that part did hurt.
I figured it would peak and slowly flatten out. what actually happens is it ambushes you in the small stuff. last tuesday I reached for my work bag. pure muscle memory, hadn’t touched it in six months.
that one landed harder than any of the obvious losses. or I’ll be reading and catch myself automatically calculating: steps to the kitchen, which grocery queue is shortest, how long I can stand before my HR climbs. I spent twenty years teaching patients energy conservation. now I do it involuntarily, for my own body, all day.
that’s its own separate grief and I don’t have a clean word for it. the identity piece of this is what I underestimated. not just what I can’t do, but all the unconscious ways being a PT was wired into how I move through a day. it keeps surfacing in moments I don’t see coming.
the big losses I can brace for. this other stuff just appears. anyone else find the small identity grief harder to absorb than the obvious ones?