Wild Losses: Honoring the Soul Sacrifices the System Won't Let You Mourn

I've sat across from too many successful people who can't name the emptiness they feel. Eyes glossy with something between exhaustion and desperation, they describe lives that look pristine on paper but feel like hollow performance in their marrow.

What they're experiencing isn't failure, it's unmetabolized grief.

Grief for the wild that was tamed out of us, and for the true freedom stolen from us in exchange for gilded cages. This is grief that civilization itself has trained us to bypass, pathologize, or medicate rather than honor as the vital force it is. Grief that our bodies hold while the system demands we keep producing.

When Systems Steal Our Mourning

The market has no mechanism for metabolizing loss, no profit in the fallow periods where meaning gets made, no quarterly growth target for the necessary decomposition that precedes genuine renewal.

Instead, we're offered productivity apps to better manage ourselves around the grief: morning routines to power through the grief, networking events to distract from the grief, performance reviews that never mention the grief.

And so our losses go underground. Unexpressed. Undigested. Unmoved.

They collect in the body like stones in a riverbed, altering the flow of our life-force until we forget the feeling of our own wild current. We call this "normal", "growing up" or "being realistic."

But deep down, you know better.

The Unmourned Losses

The body keeps inventory even when the mind abandons the count.

Remember the version of you who knew when to rest without needing permission? Who could feel true inner guidance without questioning its legitimacy? Who sensed danger and moved away from it without needing external validation? This wild creature still lives in your cells, waiting for remembrance. The domestication of your instincts wasn't something you chose; it was something done to you, gradually and deliberately, until the feral knowing went quiet beneath the weight of being good.

Before the factory whistle and now the endless ping of notifications, humans moved in rhythm with daylight and seasons. The grief of living in relentless linear time - always producing, always "on" - runs bone-deep. Your cells remember a different relationship with time and hunger for its return. This isn't nostalgia. it's your biological inheritance crying out beneath fluorescent lights and calendar alerts that fragment your days into productive units.

Most of us have never experienced true "enough-ness" because systems of extraction require our perpetual hunger to function. We don't know how to recognize "enough" resources, "enough" accomplishment, "enough" validation, because the very water we swim in whispers "more, more, more." This creates a particular kind of poverty, even amidst material wealth; the poverty of never arriving, never resting, never feeling the ground of sufficiency beneath your feet.

Each time you made a "sensible choice" over a soul-stirring one, a death occurred. Each time you chose security over meaning, safety over authenticity, or conformity over expression, something in you went quiet. These accumulated compromises create a specific kind of grief that responsible adults aren't supposed to acknowledge or indulge. To acknowledge them feels like a betrayal of your practical choices, your sunk costs, and = your carefully constructed identity as someone who has it all figured out.

Many of us float disconnected from our roots, from practices that connected our ancestors to the earth, and from the particular knowledge carried in our bloodlines. Even those with material privilege often experience a kind of rootlessness; what happens when humans become resources rather than expressions of place and people. The land your body stands upon holds stories your mind has forgotten. The seasons that move through your windows move through your body too, whether you've learned to listen or not.

How Grief Goes Underground

When we can't consciously metabolize these losses, the grief finds unconscious expression.

The executive who drives employees relentlessly is often running from his own unrealized creative potential. In quiet moments, his body remembers what it wanted to make, not manage. But that vulnerability feels too exposing, too uncertain compared to the armor of authority. So he pushes harder, expecting in others what he couldn't give himself permission to become.

The wellness influencer's perfect routines might be a structured defense against the messiness of true embodiment. Her body remembers wild pleasure that follows no schedule, healing that moves at its own pace, and rhythms that can't be optimized. Each carefully curated frame showcasing discipline masks a deep longing for surrender to forces beyond control.

The social justice advocate who can never rest might be trying to repair what can't be fixed through constant action. Her body remembers connections to land and people that systems of extraction severed generations ago. The ache of that separation drives relentless doing that can never touch the depth of that original wound without the courage to grieve what's been lost.

The entrepreneur constantly chasing the next venture may be fleeing the void that opens when the striving stops. His body remembers belonging that requires no achievement, worth that needs no proving. But that remembering feels like free-falling compared to the ladder-climbing that gives his days structure and his identity cohesion.

We bypass grief through busyness, consumption, rigid control; through numbing, and endless optimization. We try to solve in the external world what can only be metabolized through internal witnessing.

What Your Body Knows About Liberation

Your body isn't confused about what matters because it never bought the lies. Even as your mind chases achievement, acquisition, and approval, your body keeps track of what actually nourishes.

This is why your jaw clenches in meetings where everyone pretends the emperor is wearing clothes. It's why your stomach knots as you say yes when your integrity requires a no, and your shoulders creep toward your ears with each notification promising dopamine but delivering demand. It's why your breath grows shallow when you compromise what you know is true for shallow rewards.

These aren't symptoms to overcome, they're wisdom trying to reach you.

Composting the Dead Dreams

Real liberation begins with allowing grief its proper place and creating space to feel the losses that good citizens aren't supposed to acknowledge.

This isn't indulgent, it's revolutionary.

Every system of domination requires our emotional bypass to function and our refusal to feel is the unspoken fuel of empire. Our denial of death, loss, and limitation creates the exact conditions for exploitation to thrive.

To reclaim our capacity to grieve is to reject the foundational lie that we are here primarily to produce and consume rather than to fully live, feel, connect, create, and eventually die.

Rituals for Remembering

Here's how we begin metabolizing what the market told us to bypass:

Get exquisitely specific about what you've had to sacrifice for your seat at the table. Name the dreams deferred, the relationships compromised, the wild expressions abandoned, the boundaries crossed. This isn't abstract, it's the Sunday mornings you missed with your children to prepare for Monday meetings, the creative projects abandoned because they didn't scale, the intuitive hits you ignored because they didn't align with strategic plans, the body signals you overrode because deadlines didn't care about your capacity.

I don't mean to imply these things are easy to acknowledge, because they are not. But until you do, they will secretly deplete your quality of life and make you complicit in a system that prefers you pretend, and continue producing.

Most workplaces and even friendships leave little room for grief, rage, or despair—the very energies that, when metabolized, create the compost for new life. You must create intentional spaces for yourself where these emotions can move without apology. This might look like a monthly fire circle where nothing needs fixing, a dawn walk where tears can fall without explanation, a journal that holds the truth you can't yet speak aloud, or a relationship brave enough to witness without rushing toward solution.

Dance, breathwork, sound, tears, sweat... these things bypass the domesticated mind and speak directly to the body's need to process what's stored in tissue and nervous system. Find what allows emotion to move like weather through your inner landscape, leaving clarity in its wake.

Reconnect with versions of yourself that existed before professional domestication. What did that child or adolescent know about your true nature that your adult self has forgotten in service of fitting in? The ten-year-old who lost track of time in the woods wasn't wrong about where aliveness lives. The teenager who wrote poems all night wasn't confused about what feeds the soul. The young adult who swore never to compromise artistic vision for market demands wasn't naive, just not yet worn down by a system designed to exhaust resistance.

The natural world has witnessed every type of loss. The trees, stones, and waters have the capacity to hold grief that our individualistic culture has forgotten. Bring your body to earth and surrender what you've been carrying alone; let river water run over hands that have carried too much. Let the forest floor support a back that's been rigid with responsibility. Let dawn light touch closed eyelids that have seen too many screens.

This Isn't About Becoming More Whole

This is about remembering you never stopped being whole, not even when everything in this culture told you that your worth was contingent on production, optimization, and achievement.

Your grief isn't something to fix or overcome, it's the doorway to what matters most.

And here's the wild truth they don't want you to remember: when you create space to feel it all - the grief, the rage, the loss - what rises from those ashes isn't brokenness.

Its clarity so bone-deep you'll wonder how you ever lived without it.

It's desire so genuine you'll recognize the hollow hunger you've been fed as the pale imitation it always was.

It's a compass that points unerringly toward what feeds your soul, not what feeds the machine.

This is the liberation your body has been waiting for, the remembering that changes everything.

The wild in me recognizes the wild in you,

Even and especially in your grief,
Chandra Nicole

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