On grief, invisibility, and the courage it takes to finally change.

There is a line in a children’s book that I have not been able to stop thinking about.

The book is The Lion Inside, by Rachel Bright. On the surface it is a simple story: a small mouse who wants a big roar, and a lion who turns out to be terrified of the mouse. But the line that stays with me is not the one about roaring.

Forever is such a long time to be small.

I read it to my children at bedtime. And every time, I think about how many of us have been small for a very long time. Not because we are small. But because the grief we carry hasn’t been seen.

The grief nobody notices.

A few weeks ago I started writing about what I call the silent grief the losses that don’t come with a card, a ritual, or permission to mourn. The career that gave you purpose. The country that knew you without effort. The version of yourself that existed before the move, the baby, the diagnosis, the transition you chose and still mourn.


Grief researcher Kenneth Doka calls this disenfranchised grief — loss that doesn’t receive social acknowledgement. There is no framework for it, no check-in, no flowers. And so it tends to be carried quietly, dismissed as small, filed under ‘things I should be over by now.’

But here is what the book understands about the mouse, and what I have come to understand about this kind of grief: the thing we dismiss as small is often the thing holding the most power over us.

The lion was scared of the mouse.

What it means to be invisible to yourself

The mouse in the story wants to be seen. Not fixed. Not told it is actually a lion. Just seen.

This is what unnamed grief asks for too. Not resolution. Not reframing. Not being told that you have so much to be grateful for. Just acknowledgement. Just the quiet permission to say: this was a loss, and it mattered, and I am still carrying it.

The trouble is that when grief doesn’t get that acknowledgement, it doesn’t disappear. It finds other ways through. In the exhaustion that sleep doesn’t fix. In the low-grade sadness without obvious cause. In the person who says ‘I don’t even know what I’m grieving’ — which is often the most honest thing anyone can say.

Staying invisible is its own kind of staying small.

The line that is terrifying and hopeful at once

The turning point in the story comes when the mouse decides something.

If you want things to change, you first have to change you.

I have sat with that line for weeks. Because it is, on the surface, a lot to ask. Change yourself first. Before the circumstances shift. Before anyone else acknowledges the loss. Before you have it figured out.

And yet. There is something quietly radical in it. Because it means the change is not waiting on someone else’s permission. It is already possible. It begins with the decision that forever is too long to stay small.

I changed direction significantly in my own life to do the work I do now. I stood at that line. Scared. And chose to cross it. And I still carry what I left behind — not with regret, but with the tenderness you feel for something that mattered. That is not contradiction. That is grief and becoming, living together.

The mouse and the lion are both in you

Every significant transition carries both. The part that feels too small, too invisible, too unsure it has the right to grieve. And the part that has already survived every previous version of hard — every move, every reinvention, every time the ground shifted and footing was eventually found.

The work is not choosing between them. It is letting them finally see each other.

I wrote about the grief that arrives without a name — and why it rarely gets permission to be called grief in an earlier piece in this series.

If you have been carrying something unnamed while also trying to keep going — if the grief hasn’t had a space to land, or if the idea of change feels too big and too necessary at once — this is a space that holds both.

A free 20-minute introductory call is available — no pressure, just a conversation.