When You Don’t Recognize Yourself Anymore
Two widows come together to share their personal insights on how loss can profoundly reshape identity. Through honest conversation and lived experience, they explore how grief impacts the way you see yourself — and how healing can help you rediscover who you are becoming.
By Angie Hanson & Erin Clark
There’s a quiet moment that sneaks up on you in grief.
It isn’t the anniversaries. It isn’t the holidays. It isn’t the predictable ache of a date circled on the calendar.
It’s subtler than that. It’s catching your reflection and thinking, Who is this?
It’s realizing you don’t react the way you used to. That your tolerance has shifted. That your energy feels different in your own body.
That the woman who existed before Garret, Jack, & Seth died, before the layers of loss rearranged my life — feels like someone I once knew well, but no longer fully recognize.
This is an unspoken grief we don’t name enough: The grief of losing yourself while you were busy surviving.
Grief doesn’t just take people. It takes versions of us too.
Loss rearranges the internal furniture. Priorities shift. Patience shortens. Depth deepens. The world feels both louder and more fragile at the same time.
For women especially, this identity shift often goes unnoticed by everyone but us.
We are still answering texts. Still getting dressed. Still showing up to work. Still being told how “strong” we are.
But internally, something fundamental has changed.
Erin, founder of How’s the Weather, writes about this transformation after losing her husband Greg — not as a clean reinvention, but as something forged through fire.
Her words say what many women feel but struggle to articulate:
A Poem for Greg
I didn’t just lose you.
I lost the girl
who only knew life with you in it.
I lost the ease in my shoulders.
The unbroken sky.
The version of me
who thought love meant
forever on earth.
For a while,
I looked in the mirror
and saw a stranger
wearing my face.
Stronger, maybe.
But cracked.
Softer.
But sharper at the edges.
I thought grief had stolen me too.
But what it really did
was burn away
everything that wasn’t essential.
What stayed?
Love.
Loyalty.
Depth.
The courage to speak about weather
most people pretend isn’t there.
I am not who I was.
And I am not only who I became
because you left.
I am both.
The woman who loved you in sunlight.
The woman who carries you in storms.
The woman still learning
that strength can be quiet
and still be power.
The lesson I teach now — through “How’s the Weather,” through conversations — is this:
It’s normal not to recognize yourself in grief.
You are walking through internal weather systems you never trained for.
Of course you feel different.
You are different.
But different doesn’t mean diminished.
In time — and I mean real time, not social-media time —
you begin to notice something beautiful:
Grief sits beside you instead of on top of you.
The sharpness softens.
The identity confusion steadies.
You don’t go back.
You don’t “bounce back.”
You integrate.
You begin to recognize:
• the woman you were
• the woman who survived
• and the woman who is still unfolding
Grief will always be with me.
Greg will always be part of my internal weather.
But now when I look in the mirror,
I don’t see a stranger.
I see someone forged.
Someone tender.
Someone honest.
Someone who can sit with other people in their storms
without trying to fix the sky.
And maybe that’s the quiet strength grief reveals —
not who you used to be,
but who you are capable of becoming.
If you don’t recognize yourself right now,
be gentle.
You are not lost.
You are in transition.
And sometimes the most powerful version of you
is the one you haven’t fully met yet.
There is something profoundly validating about naming this. Because we live in a culture obsessed with comeback stories.
Before and after. Glow-ups. Bounce-backs.
But grief doesn’t return you to a former version. It integrates into you. It alters your nervous system. It changes your sleep. It shifts your tolerance. It redefines your identity in ways that are not always visible to others.
Research shows that prolonged grief and stress can impact hormonal balance, immune function, and emotional regulation. Of course we feel different. Our bodies have been holding storms.
The woman I was when Jack was alive — when Garret was alive — held a certain innocence. A certain assumption of how life would unfold.
That woman loved deeply. She still exists. But she has been layered with experience. With trauma. With resilience I never volunteered for.
Not recognizing yourself in grief isn’t failure. It’s adaptation. It’s the body and soul recalibrating around what has been lost.
For many women, this shows up as:
Needing more boundaries than you ever did before.
Outgrowing small talk and craving depth.
Feeling both more fragile and more fierce.
Letting go of identities built on pleasing or performing.
It can feel disorienting. But disorientation does not mean disappearance. You are not gone. You are becoming. And becoming is rarely tidy.
You may miss the woman you were. You are allowed to. You may also respect the woman you are now — even if you are still learning her edges. Integration doesn’t erase what came before. It holds it.
The woman who loved in sunlight. The woman who survived the storm. The woman still unfolding.
If you look in the mirror right now and feel unfamiliar to yourself, consider this:
You have walked through internal weather systems you never trained for. Of course you feel different. But different does not mean diminished. It means you have been reshaped by love and loss — and you are still here.
Still answering texts. Still getting dressed. Still showing up.
Not because you are “so strong.” But because you are adapting.
And sometimes, the quietest strength is simply this:
You did not disappear. You transformed.
About the Authors
Angie Hanson is the founder of Butterflies and Halos, a grief greeting card company that brings authenticity, compassion, and gentle humor to condolence cards. After experiencing profound personal loss, she set out to create sympathy messages that feel honest and human rather than filled with clichés.
Angie is also a grief advocate and author who works to normalize conversations around loss. Through her writing and advocacy, she encourages others to approach grief with empathy, openness, and hope.
Erin Clark is the founder of How’s the Weather, a clothing line designed to normalize conversations around grief and mental health. Using the simple phrase “How’s the weather?” as a gentle emotional check-in, her brand helps people navigate and express their feelings in a way that feels comfortable, accessible, and easy to communicate. Erin is a widow and a dedicated grief and loss advocate, passionate about creating spaces where honest conversations about healing can begin.
