jargon generators, time until, and the art of grieving the bad-for-you things we leave behind

It took me a long time to face grief as it arrived.

Through my 20s, I treated every pivot like a math problem. 

If I could see the logic, if I could explain why the change was necessary, then my feelings were supposed to fall in line. I told myself, "This is better. This is healthier. This is what I chose." And when the sadness still showed up anyway, I quietly filed it under "dramatic" and tried to get back to work.

It didn't work (obviously), but I wanted it to work so badly I convinced myself it was.

When my lettering career ended because my hands simply couldn’t keep up anymore, I understood the facts. Pain in my wrists. Numbness in my hands. My body was very clear that this particular way of working was no longer an option.

I could list all the reasons walking away made sense. And still, there was the grief.

I wasn’t just losing a revenue stream. I was losing the version of me who built a whole world out of ink and paper. The one who could point to stacks of prints and say, "I made that with my hands." The one who knew exactly who she was when she picked up a brush pen. The one who got to be really honest about processing difficult thoughts and emotions in a way that didn't feel selfish, just beautifully human.

The very logical part of me knew the pattern of pushing-my-body-until-it-screamed wasn’t sustainable.

I didn’t want that life back.

But the younger part of me? She missed the simplicity of being “the lettering artist.” The easy answer when someone asked, "So what do you do?" The sense of competence that came from being good at something people could see and touch. The feeling of being the person who could power through and still deliver. 

And when you start loosening your grip on that one clean label, you don’t instantly become “nothing,” you become made up of many parts.

Someone who crochets, writes, gardens, works with clay, reads, lifts, volunteers, cooks—and is also a founder, strategist, designer, marketer, author, etc. Which is gorgeous and real and also…a lot to hold. 

It took me a long time to realize none of that meant I wanted to undo the choice that I’d made. I was just grieving.

We talk a lot about letting go of patterns that burn us out: overworking, over-functioning, saying yes to everything, being the one who holds the entire system together by sheer force of will. We talk about how unsustainable it is, how exhausting, how much it costs. 

What we don’t say out loud as often is that those unsustainable patterns also gave us something we needed.

Maybe your old pattern was being the one who could handle anything. The inbox firefighter. The default fixer. The person who took on one more project, one more late-night emergency, one more round of "I’ve got it" because you actually did.

Maybe your old pattern was saying yes before you had time to check in with yourself, because the speed of that yes kept you safe. Safe from disappointing people. Safe from being seen as difficult. Safe from having to explain your limits to someone who might not understand them.

Maybe your old pattern was building your entire sense of worth around how much you produced. If you were always in motion, always producing, always useful, then you didn’t have to sit in the terrible quiet question of whether you were enough without all of that.

While those patterns were expensive in the long run, they also worked well... at least for a while.

They get you promotions and praise. They help you survive chaotic seasons. They make you feel competent and needed. They give you a recognizable identity: the reliable one, the overachiever, the eldest daughter who could be trusted to hold everything (and everyone) together.

So when you say no faster, when you stop volunteering first, when you build in rest before your body forces it.

Aka when you start changing the patterns, the ache that shows up isn’t a sign you’ve gone backward. It's a sign leaving behind more than just a behavior.

You’re leaving behind:

👉 Of course part of you misses that.

👉 Of course there’s a tug in your chest when you watch someone else sprint past their limits and get praised for it (or, hell, not have your limits), leaving you feeling like you'll always be ten steps behind.

👉 Of course there’s a tiny, secret part of you that misses knowing exactly who you were inside the overfull calendar and the overflowing inbox.

👉 Of course it feels disorienting to not have a clean, satisfying answer to "What do you do?" anymore because that list is now 10-15 things long and people look at you like a modern art piece they have to decipher instead of nice, neat box they can categorize quickly.

Missing those things doesn’t mean you want to go back.

It means the life you’re leaving was real.

You lived inside it. You built things there. You learned how to survive there. You loved people from within that old pattern. You collected evidence about who you were based on how well you could keep all those plates spinning. 

When we frame grief as resistance to change, we entirely miss that it was necessary at the time, even if it's no longer needed now. 

We start treating sadness as a problem to solve instead of a sign that something mattered. We tell ourselves, "If I really believed in this new way of doing things, I wouldn’t feel this sad," as if conviction and grief can’t exist in the same body.

But two things can be true at once. 

You can be deeply relieved to be done with a pattern that was burning you out—and still miss the parts of yourself that only knew how to exist that way.

You can be proud of the boundaries you’re setting—and still feel a pang when someone else gets the "hero" label you used to wear. 

You can be genuinely grateful for the life you’re building now—and still grieve the version of you who didn’t know another way.

I'm not an expert on grief, but I am someone who's had to face a lot of it over the last five years.

And in my experience, none of that is evidence you made the wrong choice. It’s evidence you are living.

If you want to sit with that a little, here are a few journal prompts to keep you company:

A Cozy Ruckus is where we go deeper with essays like this every Sunday. On Tuesdays, I share the more practical side with behind‑the‑scenes looks at what I’m building and implementing, plus occasional invitations over on The Bridge.