“It’s Been Years. Why Does This Still Hurt So Much?”
“I thought time would dull it. That I’d wake up one day and it wouldn’t ache like this anymore. But it still does. Quietly, sometimes. Loudly, other times. People think I should be over it by now. I don’t even talk about it anymore. But it still lives inside me, like it just happened.”
Dear Sofía,
The way you speak of this pain—with such quiet clarity—moved me. Not just because of the ache itself, but because of the loneliness wrapped around it. The ache that lingers long after anyone is still listening. The way grief becomes invisible once the timeline runs out.
There’s something so cruel in how we talk about pain in this culture. As if it’s something linear. Something that arrives, crests, and resolves. As if there’s an expiration date on heartbreak. As if years are some kind of solvent that should have washed it all away by now.
But emotional time doesn’t work like that.
And grief, especially, has its own calendar. One that doesn’t care what year it is. Or how long it’s been. Or how “together” your life might look now.
Some losses echo forever. Not because we’re broken. But because what they took from us was real, meaningful, irreplaceable.
And when something or someone mattered that deeply—when they were interwoven with your sense of safety, self, or belonging—it’s not just memory that stays. It’s sensation. It’s the way the world changed shape after they were gone. The way your inner map rewrote itself—and left one part blank.
That’s why the pain returns, sometimes out of nowhere. It’s not regression. It’s not weakness. It’s residue. Grief stored in the body, awakened by a scent, a song, a season, a silence. And not because you haven’t “moved on”—but because some things move with us.
That’s the truth we don’t say enough: healing doesn’t always mean forgetting, or even feeling better. Sometimes it just means learning to carry what never really left.
You mentioned it’s been years. And you said it like a confession. Like you’re worried it makes you less healed. Less whole. But I want to say this as gently and firmly as I can: time is not the same as distance. And the calendar doesn’t get to tell you when your feelings expire.
It may have been years on the outside. But that doesn’t mean your inside has caught up.
Sometimes, we delay our own grieving just to survive. We move forward because we have to. Because there were bills to pay. Or children to raise. Or expectations to meet. Or no one around who could bear the full weight of our loss. So we suppress. We compartmentalize. We stay busy.
And in doing so, we postpone the grief. We press pause on the mourning. Not because we’re weak, but because we didn’t feel safe enough to fall apart.
And then, later—when things slow down—when the noise fades—when there’s space again—the pain returns. Not because we’re backtracking. But because we’re finally ready to feel what we couldn’t before.
This is what we mean when we talk about delayed grief. It doesn’t mean you didn’t love deeply. It means your grief had to wait for you to be strong enough to hold it.
And even when grief comes in “on time,” healing is rarely a straight path. It loops. It reactivates. It stirs when we least expect it. Anniversaries, birthdays, holidays, random Tuesdays. Because grief doesn’t live on a schedule. It lives in the nervous system. In the muscle memory of love.
So when people say, “It’s been years,” as if that’s supposed to mean something… I want to tell you that the clock isn’t the compass. Your grief is not measured by time passed—but by love invested.
Some losses are formative. They don’t go away. They become part of your story.
And maybe what hurts now isn’t just the person or moment you lost. Maybe it’s everything that changed in you after that. The version of you that never came back. The safety that never fully returned. The joy that never quite tastes the same.
Sometimes what we’re grieving isn’t a single event—it’s an entire before.
And when the world keeps turning, but your emotional world still stutters—you can feel like you’re defective. You’re not. You’re just honest.
And the truth is, some things hurt longer than others. Some absences don’t fade. Some heartbreaks become part of our architecture.
But that doesn’t mean you haven’t healed. It means you’ve woven the pain into your life. It means you’ve adapted. That you’re carrying it—maybe quietly, maybe with grace—but still carrying it. And that’s a kind of strength the world doesn’t often applaud, but should.
Sofía, you don’t need to rush this.
You don’t need to justify why it still hurts.
You don’t need to perform being “over it” just because the world gets uncomfortable with long grief.
Your pain is real. It’s yours. And it gets to exist, even now.
You’re not weak for still hurting.
You’re still healing.
Still with you,
–RJ