Fifteen years ago, I walked into my counselor’s office for one of our weekly sessions and opened by telling him, “I feel like a loser.” Over the next hour, we talked through what was going on in my life to lead to this utterance, and by the end of the hour he had gently steered me to the realization that the derogatory term I’d assigned myself belied a deeper truth: I was experiencing loss that was hacking away at my heart, and I didn’t know what to do with it.

No one had died. Nothing monumental had happened. Rather, it was more about things that weren’t happening. But the pain was real, and over the next decade and a half (and still), he taught me to recognize the space between what things are and what they should be, and to grieve it. 

Read the rest over at Mockingbird!