When you have invested a lot of yourself in something, and then it’s no longer there for reasons beyond your control, you are likely to feel a deep sense of loss.
Grief, as a cathartic process, is very useful for moving through these transitions , whether you’ve lost a job, or a friend, or you’ve moved. You need to feel the loss fully so that anger and bitterness about wasted time and energy, denial about how much you cared, and other feelings of regret and sorrow can be let go. That requires you to cry them out, to wail and sob until they are no longer an important part of your day— to grieve actively. Alla Bozarth, an Episcopal priest and young widow, writes about surviving her deepest sorrow, concluding a poem with these lines:
What I am learning from this
is that I am awakening.
We must let go of what we’ve lost and experience all the pain that is the price of renewal.