Lost/Adrift: When You Don't Know Which Way Is Forward

There is a particular kind of disorientation that doesn't always show up in conversations about grief. It isn't necessarily sadness. It isn't necessarily shock. Sometimes it is simply the unsettling feeling of no longer knowing which way is forward.

Who am I now?

What does my life look like from here?

What am I supposed to do with what happened?

What do I believe now?

Where do I go when the life I thought I was living isn't the life I'm living anymore?

This is the space we call Lost/Adrift.

We picture it as a wilderness: dense trees, fog, unfamiliar ground, no clearly marked trail. Loss can disrupt more than what we have lost. It can disrupt the assumptions we used to orient ourselves. Someone who loses a spouse may also be trying to understand what it means to become a widow or widower. Someone whose marriage ends may grieve the relationship while also questioning the identity they held within it.

Someone who loses a job may discover that the loss involves income, routine, community, purpose, status, and a sense of who they were.

Reproductive loss can raise questions about the body, parenthood, identity, fairness, faith, and an imagined future. A friendship ending can leave someone grieving a person who is still alive while also losing shared history, belonging, rituals, and the version of themselves that existed within that relationship. This is why Lost/Adrift can feel so difficult to explain.

Sometimes the question isn't simply What did I lose? It is: What else changed because I lost it? People may return to the same thoughts, memories, questions, and emotions again and again here. From the outside, that circling can look like being stuck. But revisiting something is not necessarily the same as standing still. Imagine walking through a forest without a marked trail. You may pass the same stand of trees more than once. You may recognize a landmark and wonder how you've ended up there again. From where you're standing, it can feel like you're walking in circles, but from above, the movement may look more like a spiral. You encounter familiar territory from a slightly different position. A memory means something different at 45 than it did at 30. A child's milestone can change the meaning of an old loss. A new relationship can raise questions about a previous one. Becoming the age someone was when they died can make a loss feel different decades later. The loss hasn't necessarily changed. You have.

And so you may encounter it differently. That is one reason TMGL does not assume that returning to grief means someone has gone backward. There may be something here that wasn't visible before. Lost/Adrift gives us permission to recognize disorientation without immediately turning it into pathology. It gives us language for the experience of trying to orient ourselves when something important about our internal or external world has changed. The trail through unfamiliar ground isn't always waiting to be found. Sometimes it is made by walking it. And sometimes we walk parts of it more than once.

Griefly Speaking: A Reflective Workbook to Understand How Grief and Loss Shape Your Life offers guided reflection for understanding what may be shaping your own experience of feeling Lost/Adrift, and what you may be discovering as you continue to live with loss.

Griefly Speaking is available for purchase on Amazon.

Free Clinician Guide to help with your clients

Free Reflection Guide to Understand your own grief