The Person I Was Before I Knew Too Much

When the Life You Expected Doesn't Happen: Before I Knew Too Much.

There is a quiet grief that comes with living long enough to understand how fragile plans really are.

Not the kind of grief marked by funerals or sympathy cards — but the kind that settles in slowly, when you realize the life you assumed would unfold no longer fits the body, history, or circumstances you inhabit.

Many of us carry a memory of who we were before we knew too much.

Before we understood how quickly health can change.

Before we learned that love does not guarantee safety.

Before we discovered that effort does not always lead to an outcome.

Psychology tells us that identity is not fixed — it is narrative. We understand ourselves through the story we believe we are living (McAdams & Pals, 2021). When that story collapses, the loss is not only situational. It is existential.

“Some losses don’t take a person — they take a future.”

A Personal Reflection

Holidays were to always be joyous.

It wasn't.

I lost my dad when he was fifty-two.

A stroke.

On Christmas Day.

So even though holidays were supposed to be happy, they never really were again.

I was a dancer. A gymnast.

My body was strong — obedient.

I could move as if nothing could stop me.

It did.

I thought I would go to college, meet the man of my dreams, have a child, and build a career.

I thought life followed effort.

It didn’t.

I’m almost forty-five now.

I have multiple sclerosis.

I live with my mother.

I have two sons with different fathers.

I’m not with the man of my dreams.

I never was.

I didn’t make all the right decisions.

But I didn’t know then what I know now.

And that’s the part people don’t understand.

“You don’t fail because you’re careless — you fail because you’re human, making choices with incomplete information.”

When Identity Is Interrupted

Major life disruptions — illness, trauma, loss — force what researchers call identity reorganization (Adler et al., 2022). The assumptions we carry quietly dissolve:

My body will cooperate.

My effort will be rewarded.

Time will be kind.

When those assumptions break, we are left grieving not just what happened, but who we were when we believed differently.

This is not a weakness.

It is cognition catching up to reality.

Neuroscience shows that the brain updates its understanding of the world through lived experience. When reality repeatedly violates expectation, the nervous system adapts — often before language can keep up (Friston et al., 2021).

“Knowing too much isn’t pessimism — it’s the cost of paying attention.”

Grieving While Still Alive

This kind of grief is rarely acknowledged. There is no socially accepted script for mourning a former self. Researchers describe this as ambiguous or disenfranchised grief — losses that are real, but not publicly validated (Boss, 2022; Doka, 2023).

People may encourage gratitude.

They may say, “At least you’re still here.”

And you are.

But you are also different.

Both can be true.

The Body as Teacher

For those living with chronic illness, the body becomes the clearest instructor. What once felt automatic now requires negotiation. Research on interoception shows that bodily unpredictability reshapes self-concept over time (Khalsa et al., 2021).

The body enforces limits that the mind once ignored.

“Your value does not disappear when your capacity changes.”

Integration, Not Recovery

Healing is often framed as a return — getting back to who you were. But psychology increasingly recognizes that some experiences require integration, not recovery (Park, 2022).

Integration means holding multiple truths at once:

• You miss who you were.

• You respect who you are now.

• You no longer measure life by the same metrics.

Post-traumatic growth does not erase grief. It coexists with it (Tedeschi et al., 2021).

Closing

If you miss the person you were before you knew too much, you are not broken.

You are remembering someone who mattered.

And if your life looks smaller now — slower, quieter, less impressive — consider this:

It may not be smaller at all.

It may simply be shaped by truth.

References

Adler, J. M., Dunlop, W. L., Fivush, R., Lilgendahl, J. P., Lodi-Smith, J., McAdams, D. P., & Syed, M. (2022). Narrative identity and meaning-making across the lifespan. Journal of Personality, 90(2), 202–220.

Boss, P. (2022). The myth of closure (2nd ed.). W. W. Norton & Company.

Doka, K. J. (2023). Disenfranchised grief in contemporary loss contexts. OMEGA – Journal of Death and Dying, 86(3), 387–402.

Friston, K., Parr, T., & de Vries, B. (2021). The graphical brain: Belief propagation and active inference. Network Neuroscience, 5(1), 1–20.

Khalsa, S. S., et al. (2021). Interoception and mental health: A roadmap. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 22, 63–76.

McAdams, D. P., & Pals, J. L. (2021). The narrative identity model. Psychological Inquiry, 32(3), 182–195.

Park, C. L. (2022). Meaning making following trauma. Psychological Trauma, 14(1), 1–10.

Tedeschi, R. G., Shakespeare-Finch, J., Taku, K., & Calhoun, L. G. (2021). Posttraumatic growth: Theory, research, and applications. Psychological Inquiry, 32(1), 1–18.