What We Lost While We Were Coping
The Quiet Grief Behind Our Disconnection
I write about softness while sprinting through my weeks. About stillness, while half my life is packed in boxes and the rest is buried under a to-do list I stopped pretending I could finish.
This isn’t a “look how busy I am” flex.
It’s a confession.
Because I know what I need… and I’m not giving it to myself. And that, that, is its own kind of ache.
There’s a difference between being out of alignment and forgetting what alignment feels like. I haven’t forgotten. I just can’t seem to reach it right now. And that hurts in a quiet, persistent way.
You probably know that feeling too.
The ache for quiet, but nowhere to put it.
The hunger for presence, while your phone buzzes with everything urgent and nothing important.
We want to slow down. We crave it. But life doesn’t let up. Not for long enough to exhale. Not without guilt, or consequences, or someone needing something from you.
So instead of stillness, we settle for speed.
We adapt to the hum of over-functioning.
We call it “just a busy season” while the seasons change, and we don’t.
And maybe that’s what it means to be human right now: To know what alignment looks like, but feel too out of reach to return to it.
But here’s the truth I’m learning:
Sometimes awareness is the only softness available to us. And naming the dissonance, honestly, unapologetically, might be the first step home.
The truth is, somewhere along the way, we all adapted. We streamlined. We optimized. We made peace with a pace that doesn’t make peace with us.
But deep down, we’re mourning something.
Not the loud losses.
The slow, quiet ones.
We’re grieving…
The long conversations that used to meander.
The mornings that began with breath, not alerts.
The dinners that were shared, not scrolled.
The boredom that made space for creativity.
The parts of ourselves we traded in for efficiency.
We didn’t call it grief.
Because nothing catastrophic happened.
But everything changed.
And that soft sorrow we carry?
It has a name.
Micro-mourning.
The sorrow that doesn’t get a eulogy.
The ache of knowing life used to feel different, and better, in ways we can’t quite name.
So if you feel… off?
That’s not failure.
That’s evidence.
Of how much you've been carrying.
Of how much you still remember.
And maybe that’s a kind of hope too.
Because once you notice what’s gone missing, you can begin, gently, imperfectly, to bring it back.
A New Kind of Beginning
So this week, don’t ask how to do more.
Ask what you miss.
Ask what you long for in the background of your days.
Ask what your nervous system still remembers.
And what it might mean to honor that.
One small return at a time.
One breath before the scroll.
One dinner where the phones stay away.
One ritual that belongs to you and no one else.
This isn’t about going backward.
It’s about building a life that has room for you in it again.
And no, you might not be living it yet. But the fact that you remember?
That means your aliveness is intact. That your capacity for presence, for joy, for connection, it’s still in you.
Waiting. Not lost. Just paused.
And maybe the world doesn’t need us to move faster.
Maybe it needs more people who are willing to feel again.
To remember again.
To choose differently.
The return to ourselves is not a luxury. It’s a revolution. And every small act of remembering is how we begin to build a more human world.
With love,
Dr. Zelana