Becoming a different version of yourself after grief

I am back at university after a year of studying abroad in France. My dad passed away at the start of my second year.

After that I felt trapped, so claustrophobic and battling demons in my brain every single day. I had a rather full circle moment earlier this week. I did my daily walk to the library, enjoying the rare sunshine that hits the north of England, taking in the beautiful reds, burnt orange and crimson of the falling autumn leaves.

I crossed the road that led up to my first-year accommodation. The place where I dealt with crippling anxiety, chronic depression and started on anti-depressant medication.

I looked back down another road, where my second-year house was; the dark, empty and cold walls I returned to just six weeks after my dad passed, where I constantly felt isolated, alone and unhappy. 

Exactly two years on from my dad’s passing, I don’t wish to claim that “my life is together.” Because it is not. But if we are looking back to those first two years of university, it is certainly better. University comes with so many changes and struggles and dealing with grief alongside this experience is really just the hardest challenge. I do not recognise the person that lived in those first-year halls or that dark and mouldy second year house. She is someone entirely different to me now. I think that has been the hardest transition in my journey of grief. That my dad never knew the person I am now. He lost his battle with illness when I was at the lowest point of my life, where I would call him daily, attempting to explain how I couldn’t last a day without crying and having multiple anxiety attacks. I am not sure if he ever really understood how I truly felt, but he listened and was always on the other end of the phone to encourage me to go for a walk or speak to a friend.

Losing a parent as a teenager or young adult comes with such impossible challenges. It is truly the period of our lives when we are changing the most, moving in and out of university, relationships, jobs, friendships, locations. A rather unstable period for many of us, it is inevitable that we become different versions of ourselves.

In your teens and twenties, you will morph into different versions of yourself as you grow into a fully formed adult, tasked with making difficult life choices and taking different paths. It is truly painful that my dad won’t get to meet his new version of me, happy in myself, my life and confident in my future. But if this is something that you are struggling with too, then my best advice is that these changes are likely a result of who your person was and what they meant to you. 

For me the turning point was spending a year of my degree in Paris. Most people told me I was nuts for moving abroad just months after my dad passed, away from family and friends. But it felt like the right thing to do in the moment. I needed to escape the confines of university and my life in England. I am not sure my dad would believe it if he could see how much I threw myself into experience and the incredible friends and life skills that I gained from it.

This is not me suggesting that everyone dealing with grief should pack up and move away! But rather what I am trying to tell people is that losing a parent at a uniquely young age sadly means we have to face this awful reality of changing and morphing into different versions of ourselves when they are no longer here. And importantly, these new versions may not always be immediately positive, but this “grief club” that we are all a part of does find funny ways of helping us be okay with change.

I feel privileged that the ways I could make the most of my year abroad largely resemble the best traits that I saw in my dad – talking to new people, listening, laughing over food and drink, and I love now that the friends I met in France often tell me that they can feel and know exactly what my dad was like through me. So even if I am changing into a different version of myself, I always carry a part of my dad with me, through personality and strength. Rather than him not being able to see who I am now, he has made this version of myself as I take inspiration every day from his character and resilience.