You're Allowed to Miss Who You Used to Be

Everyone talks about the first one.

Going from childhood into your teens — your body changes, the way you think shifts, your feelings get louder, and slowly you stop being a kid and start figuring out who you actually are. It's so ordinary that nobody blinks when it happens.

But there's another kind of grief nobody mentions: going from your teens into adulthood.

That one's quieter. It doesn't happen overnight, and there's no specific morning where you wake up feeling like an adult. You just notice, one day, that your decisions carry more weight. That there's less room to get it wrong. That life feels more serious than you ever pictured.

Without meaning to, you stop thinking only about right now. You start asking where you want to be in five years, what work you want, which city you'd like to live in, whether you're even making the right calls. And nobody says it out loud, but all of that can be frightening.

Here's the strange part: while you're busy building a new version of yourself, you're also quietly saying goodbye to the old one.

You miss how light everything used to feel. How easy it was to make friends. Afternoons with nothing to worry about, and that sense that you still had all the time in the world to figure out who you wanted to be. You even miss the person you were — knowing full well you don't fit there anymore.

I think that's a kind of grief too.

Because growing up isn't only about meeting new versions of yourself. It's also learning to let go of the ones that already did their job.

It took me a while to understand that it isn't about trying to become who you were again. It's about thanking that version for getting you here. Every stage leaves something behind: a lesson, a friendship, a dream, a wound, a different way of looking at things.

Maybe growing up was never about leaving that person behind, but about carrying them with you while you make room for someone new.

And maybe that's the beautiful part — accepting that we're made of every version we've ever been. Even the ones we still miss, every now and then.