People asked me when I was young:

People asked me when I was young: “Did losing your mom affect you?”

I told them no. Of course not. I was resilient. Kids bounce back.

But something inside me went quiet for years. Grief settles like dust — you don’t see it until the sun hits it at the right angle.

I think it truly surfaced the summer after high school, when I worked at the factory and felt the full weight of adulthood crashing down. The lunch bell sounded like a warning. The fluorescent lights felt like a betrayal. I remember standing in the bathroom, staring at myself in the mirror, thinking:

I miss being a kid. I miss my mom. I miss whatever I thought life was supposed to be.

I didn’t recognize it as grief. Only a strange, deep nostalgia — like watching your childhood drift downstream and knowing you can’t follow.

But I’m older now, and I can say what I couldn’t then:

Losing her didn’t just affect me. It set the foundation for everything. It shaped my relationship with safety, trust, desire, ambition. It cracked me open before I knew what I was losing.