I want to take a minute to talk about loss. And probably not in a way that you’re used to hearing. But loss in a way that we make decisions and don’t realize the magnitude of our loss until the regret becomes too big and action comes too late.

Honestly, this is something that I’ve struggled with my whole life. I want this, but I also want that. I want that job overseas, but I also have a responsibility to my family. I want that horse to ride, but I also want the flexibility to do whatever I want. I want children, but I want my life. And here’s the thing that I’ve finally come to accept. There is no path forward without loss. And we are a culture that has not yet learned to hold that truth with any grace.

The Hardest Thing to Sit With (And Why We Never Do)

Sit with that for a second.

Not in the anxious way we usually sit with hard things, turning it over and over, trying to find the angle that makes it manageable. Just… sit with it. Maybe make yourself a cup of something warm first. Let it be true for a moment, without immediately trying to fix it, reframe it, or Google your way out of it.

I’m starting to think that might be the bravest thing any of us can do.

Why Women Are Especially Good at Moving Forward (And Terrible at Feeling What We Left Behind)

Here’s the part I want to gently call out, because I think it’s very specifically an “us” problem.

We are a generation of optimizers. Somewhere along the way, we absorbed the belief that every hour was a resource to be maximized. We tracked our sleep. We batched our errands. We turned Sunday meal prep into a personality. The idea of doing something with absolutely no measurable outcome; fishing for the sake of fishing, watching clouds, reading a novel you’ll never discuss with anyone, started to feel almost irresponsible. Like we were falling behind in the game of living.

And I say this with total affection, because I am this person. I once scheduled a “rest day” in my Google Calendar and then felt vaguely guilty when I didn’t optimize it correctly.

The point is: we got so good at moving forward that we completely forgot to stop and feel what we were leaving behind.

The Story You Tell Yourself — and the One You Don’t

Here’s what I’ve noticed. In my own life and in conversations with so many women I love and work with:

We don’t grieve the paths we don’t take. We treat them like they simply ceased to exist the moment we chose the other direction.

The woman who stays home with her children tells herself the story of love, of presence, of being there. And those things are real, profound, and worth telling. But she doesn’t often let herself tell the other story. The one about the version of herself that had her own schedule, her own professional identity, the particular small pleasure of a lunch break where nobody needed anything from her. That version doesn’t vanish when she chooses differently. She just goes unacknowledged. She becomes a quiet ache that shows up at unexpected moments. In the grocery store when she overhears someone talking about a promotion. Or on a Tuesday afternoon when the house is finally quiet and she can’t quite name what she’s feeling.

And the woman who pours herself into her career? She gets to tell herself the story of independence, of contribution, of building something real. That story is also true. But somewhere underneath it, maybe on a random Wednesday when she picks up her kid from school and realizes the teacher knows her child’s favorite book and she doesn’t, there’s another story. About the slower pace she never got to know. The small daily intimacies that slipped by while she was in a conference room becoming impressive.

And the woman trying to do both? She’s often just… tired. In that specific way that isn’t solved by sleep.

What Nobody Told Us About the Choices We Were Making

None of these stories are wrong. All of them are true at once. And I wonder if that’s actually the hardest part? Not choosing the wrong path, but accepting that every path comes with a real, genuine cost that no amount of hustle or intention or positive thinking can make disappear.

We were never handed that information upfront. Nobody pulled us aside at 28 and said, “Here’s what each of these actually costs you. Not in theory. In your body. In your daily life. In the part of you that will quietly miss what you didn’t choose.”

Instead, we got complete pictures. Visions. The career path looked like a glossy magazine spread of freedom and impact. The family path looked like a golden-hour Instagram photo of warmth and meaning. Neither image came with the honest footnote: this is a trade, not a destination.

So we walked in unprepared. And the grief arrived anyway. Usually in a therapist’s office a few years later, or in a quiet moment in the school pickup line when something unnameable tightens in your chest, and you sit there in your car, sunglasses on, hoping nobody knocks on the window.

(You know that moment. I know you know that moment.)

Grieving Forward: A Different Way to Make Decisions

So what if we named it before we were already living inside it?

I’m not suggesting this makes the trade easier, or that grief looked at in advance somehow doesn’t count. Maybe it’s more like this: there’s a difference between a surprise wave knocking you off your feet and a wave you saw coming, braced for, rode as best you could. The wave is still real either way. But one of them doesn’t leave you wondering what just happened.

A question I’ve been sitting with lately, and one I’d offer to anyone facing a real fork in the road, isn’t which path do I choose?

It’s this:

What specific losses am I willing to carry? And have I actually let myself feel them in advance, rather than just hoping they won’t show up?

There’s no perfect answer. But there’s something quietly powerful about asking it honestly before your life has already been built around the decision.

How Acupuncture and Healing Can Help You Process What Words Can’t Always Reach

This is tender work, and I want to be clear: I don’t think most of us skipped this step because we were careless. I think we skipped it because nobody told us it was a step. We were taught to optimize, to decide, to commit, to make it work. We weren’t taught to sit quietly with a future path and ask, “What will I miss? What will I mourn? What will I be carrying ten years from now that I haven’t yet made room for”?

That conversation, the honest, prospective, a-little-bit-heartbreaking one, almost never gets had. Because having it requires admitting that there’s no perfect choice waiting for us on the other side of enough research. And we are a culture that wants to believe there is.

Ready to Start Hearing Yourself Again? I’m Here.

The work I love most, and the work I do with women in my practice, isn’t about telling anyone which path to take. It’s about helping them hear themselves clearly enough to know what they’re actually choosing, and to grieve what they’re leaving behind with intention rather than discovering it accidentally a decade later.

If something in this piece landed somewhere real for you, if you recognized yourself in that school pickup line, or in the scheduled rest day, or in the quiet ache of a path not taken, I’d love for you to reach out.

You don’t have to have it all figured out. You just have to be willing to start the conversation.

I’d love to be part of that with you. Reach out to the office — the first step is just saying hello. You can schedule a no-cost 15 minute info session and you can find out more about the Classical Medicine here.