15/08/2026
When Papa transitioned, I automatically took my role as the eldest sibling seriously.
I’d already decided that falling apart wasn’t allowed.
I’m the eldest of three, and somewhere in the middle of losing Papa, I decided, without anyone actually asking me to, that I had to hold everything together, not just for my siblings, for my mum too.
So I tried not to cry in front of them.
I made sure everyone else was ok, and I told myself that was what being strong and being the eldest meant.
It took years to understand what that actually cost me.
Not the holding together itself, believing I wasn’t allowed to fall apart in front of the people who needed me to be human just as much as I needed them to be.
This isn’t toxic positivity dressed up in nicer words, your pain is real and it deserves space, all of it.
I’ve come to see grief as something you move forward with though.
Slowly building a new kind of normal.
One you get to choose rather than default back into.
And it’s one of the only things that actually makes you stop and ask what normal was even for.
Being the eldest was its own kind of script I never questioned, grow up fast, hold it together, look after everyone else first, and losing Papa was the thing that finally made me look at that properly.
This is what I mean by a higher perspective on loss, strong was never supposed to mean invisible, and losing him was never the good part, what’s good is what it forced me to finally notice about the life I actually wanted, while I was still living it.
Your hardest chapter can become your teacher too, right alongside the pain, while the pain is still there.
If you were the one who held it together for everyone else, and you’re still doing it now, that’s exactly the pattern we look at understanding properly on a Greatest Gift Exploration Call, seeing this with a new lens, and learning how Rapid Transformational Therapy gets underneath why you decided that was your job in the first place. Link in bio.
