Nobody Sends Flowers

💡 Insight

In 1989 the grief researcher Kenneth Doka named something most people have felt and never had a word for: disenfranchised grief — grief for a loss that isn't openly acknowledged, socially validated, or publicly mourned. No casserole shows up. Nobody asks how you're holding up.

Getting sober is full of it. You lost something. Not a good thing — but a reliable one. The thing that turned the volume down, that filled the empty evening, that made the party survivable, that made you feel briefly like the version of yourself you liked best. And everyone around you is congratulating you on the loss, which makes it nearly impossible to say out loud that some part of you is in mourning.

That gap is what makes early sobriety so disorienting. It isn't only craving. It's grief with nowhere to put itself. And grief with nowhere to put itself doesn't leave — it just stops announcing where it is.

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✦ Quote

"Ah, grief, I should not treat you
like a homeless dog
who comes to the back door
for a crust, for a meatless bone.
I should trust you."

— Denise Levertov, "Talking to Grief"

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◎ Prompt

Finish this sentence without arguing with yourself about whether you're allowed to: What I actually miss is ______. Push past the substance itself to the thing underneath it — the quiet, the confidence, the off-switch, the company. Then ask the harder question: is that thing available to you anywhere else?