No Juan Is An Island

I had intended to publish this blog post on Grief Awareness Day back on August 30. I have been working on it since last month, but every time I sat down to piece it together, I found myself paralyzed—grieving through a cascade of heavy realizations, trying to survive on a daily basis, and dealing with a series of almost daily breakdowns. It took me a long while to finally acknowledge a hard truth: grief is not always about someone dying. I have been grieving so many different losses over the past few years without fully realizing it.
Right outside my window here in Baguio City, the rain has been relentless and continuous for over a month now. There is something deeply oppressive about a sky that refuses to clear up, days blurring together in a uniform wash of grey mist and moisture that seeps into everything. Truly, grief can feel just as strong and act in the exact same way as losing a person. It rolls in uninvited, settles heavy in your bones, and drenches every corner of your life until you forget what dry warmth actually feels like.
After being diagnosed with a life-changing progressive eye disability in 2022, life was never the same. We can grieve a future that is different from the one we imagined for ourselves. I never thought I had to give up a lot of things I love, not because I want to, but because I was forced to by my circumstances. I can no longer travel, hike, do physical activities like running, playing tennis, or badminton, and worst of all, I had to give up photography—things I always thought I’d be doing for as long as I live.

Just like this endless mountain downpour that traps you indoors, disability alters your landscape entirely. We can grieve the years lost to chronic illnesses or disabilities, just like the profound impact of my visual impairment on my daily life, my social life, and even the potential of being in a relationship. My disability often feels heavy, acting as a constant boundary and limitation to so many things.
The losses keep compounding, much like rising floodwaters. We can grieve a pet that died. My dogs Adage and Kabbave both died this year, and both are irreplaceable pieces of my life that left gaping holes in my quiet home. We can grieve a home we loved but had to leave. I had to walk away from a house because I no longer felt safe, and the space simply stopped feeling like a home.
We can also grieve a friendship that is lost or changed. I have friends who suddenly stopped connecting or talking altogether. Others are still physically around, but it feels like you are not understood whenever you share your woes and worries. It makes reaching out terribly difficult because you fear you will just be invalidated, hence you end up isolating yourself in the cold.

The professional and emotional landscapes bear scars, too. We can grieve a job we left or never got. It was a very difficult decision back then when I had to resign from a job I so loved because of my disability, leaving me unemployed for four years now. I have been applying for new roles the past two years and no one would give me a chance just because I am visually challenged. The most painful blow was when I applied for a position I desperately wanted and ended up being rejected explicitly because I hadn’t been employed for three years—deemed unupdated with what’s new and not competitive enough by corporate standards.
Beyond career and health, we can grieve relationships that did not exist, or how they should have been. As I grow older, I feel the quiet, aching desire to have someone who’d be there for me through thick and thin, through ups and downs, and it is terribly difficult to find that kind of partnership. It is also a profound pity that my immediate family members have become estranged, especially my sister who, after I had helped her during her most trying times, would make me feel gaslighted, invalidated, and show no empathy at all. Her narcissism has made our family relationship impossible to fix.
Grief, much like the relentless Baguio rain, doesn’t always arrive as a sudden, violent storm. Sometimes, it is just a persistent drizzle that wears you down day after day, soaking through your layers until you are shivering from the inside out. You cannot outrun it, and you cannot simply pretend it isn’t wet and freezing.

If you, too, are mourning a life you never wanted to leave behind, a career stolen by circumstance, a body that changed without your permission, or connections that withered away, please know that your pain is entirely valid. You do not need a casket or a formal eulogy to justify the ache in your chest. Some losses are invisible to the rest of the world, hidden behind dark glasses or quiet rooms, but they hurt just the same. And while the rain outside my window is still pouring, I am slowly learning how to breathe through the dampness, holding space for all the things I loved, lost, and had to leave behind.