The Deaths Nobody Talks About
We are honored you are here for this one. Because this kind of grief is the quietest kind, and the least socially acceptable.
When someone dies, the world gives you language for it. A funeral. A date to mark on the calendar. People who ask how you are doing.
But when a version of yourself dies, there is nothing.
No ceremony. No acknowledged loss. In fact, the world usually celebrates it. You got out of that relationship. You left that job. You stopped being that person. Good for you. That is growth.
And it is growth. But that does not mean it did not cost you something.
Think about the versions of yourself that had to die to get you here.
The one who believed the world was safe before something happened that proved otherwise. The one who trusted easily before that trust was broken badly enough to leave a scar. The one who was going to be a certain kind of person and live a certain kind of life, and then the path shifted, and that future dissolved quietly. The one who loved someone in a way that never got fully returned, and eventually had to stop. The one who was innocent in ways they can never fully get back.
These are real losses. The grief that comes with them is real. And because there is no ritual for it, most people carry it without ever putting it down.
What Unacknowledged Identity Loss Does to You
Dr. Dan McAdams at Northwestern University has spent decades studying what he calls narrative identity — the story a person constructs about who they are across time. His research shows that psychological wellbeing is directly tied to how integrated your personal narrative is. Whether the earlier chapters of your life feel connected to who you are now, or whether they feel cut off, unresolved, or shameful.
When past versions of yourself are buried without acknowledgment, they do not stay buried. They surface as patterns. As overreactions that seem disproportionate to what triggered them. As sudden grief in the middle of an ordinary day. As a persistent sense of loss you cannot locate.
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett’s work on emotional construction at Northeastern University shows that the brain does not just process current experience in isolation. It continuously references past experience to predict and make meaning out of the present. When past versions of yourself are unresolved, your nervous system keeps trying to finish what was never completed. It keeps reaching back toward those moments because they were never properly closed.
The work of honoring what has passed is not sentimental. It is neurological. It is how you stop the past from running the present without your permission.
The Difference Between Burial and Honoring
Most people bury their past selves. They do not honor them.
Burial says: that person was a problem. I have moved past them. I do not want to look at them.
Honoring says: that person did their best with what they had. They survived things that were hard. They made choices that made sense given what they knew and what they feared. They got me here. And they deserve to be seen for that before I move forward.
There is something in you that already knows the difference between these two things. You can feel it.
The past self you buried without ceremony? It is still knocking somewhere. Still asking to be seen.
The past self you have genuinely honored? You can think about them with something closer to peace.
You do not have to agree with every choice that version of you made. You do not have to be proud of everything they did. But you do have to acknowledge that they existed, that they carried real weight, and that without them you would not be standing where you are right now.
A Personal Note
There is a version of me that I had to leave behind in my twenties that I did not properly grieve for a long time. He believed certain things about who he was supposed to be. About what success looked like. About what a man was allowed to feel or need. He worked hard and moved fast and kept a lot of things inside.
I did not honor him when I changed. I just moved on and called it growth.
It took sitting in ceremony years later to realize I had been carrying the ungrieved weight of his life the entire time. That some of my current patterns were his. That some of the ways I pushed too hard or protected myself too quickly were his habits that I had never formally released.
The medicine showed him to me. And for the first time, I sat with him and said: I see you. Thank you. You can rest now.
Something shifted that day that no amount of forward-facing growth had been able to shift. Because you cannot fully become who you are becoming while you are still running from who you were.
How Working with Plant Medicine Opens This
When you work with Psilocybin, the medicine has a particular way of presenting you to yourself across time. People regularly report seeing their younger selves during a journey, not as distant memories but as present, living experiences. The medicine asks you to stay with those encounters rather than move through them quickly. To speak to that version of yourself. To complete what was left incomplete. To grieve what was never grieved. This is not regression. It is integration. It is the difference between a story that is finished and one that is still open.
When you work with Kambo, it purges what you have been carrying physically. And what you carry physically includes the accumulated emotional weight of identities you never put down. After a Kambo ceremony, people often report feeling not just physically lighter but somehow more current. More present to who they are now rather than who they were. That is the medicine clearing out what you kept holding onto without realizing it.
Something to Listen To This Week
Put on Bon Iver’s “Holocene.” It is a song about standing in the present and being overwhelmed by the accumulated weight of the past. About the gap between who you thought you would be and who you actually became. Play it with your eyes closed. Let it find the places in you that are still carrying something unfinished.
If you have not heard it before, you will know within thirty seconds why it belongs here.
Action Prompt
This week, write a short letter to one past version of yourself. Not the one you are proud of. The one you moved away from fastest. The one you had the least patience for.
Tell them what they got right that you have never acknowledged. Tell them what it cost them to get you here. Tell them they can rest.
You do not have to share it with anyone. You do not have to resolve anything. You just have to say what has not been said yet.
That act alone, small and quiet as it is, closes something that may have been open for years.
Now We Want to Hear From You
Is there a version of yourself you have buried rather than honored?
And what do you think it would feel like to finally say goodbye to them properly?
