It Took 12 Years to Grieve a Uniform I Chose to Take Off
If you’re struggling right now, you don’t have to carry it alone. In the UK, Samaritans are free to call any time on 116 123. Veterans and serving personnel can contact Op COURAGE, the NHS veterans’ mental health service. If life is in immediate danger, call 999.
I left the army in 2014. It would be more than a decade before I understood that I had been grieving the whole time. As I said in one of our conversations: I hadn’t grieved leaving the military. I hadn’t just let it go. And it took twelve years to grieve, if that makes sense.
It makes complete sense — and it’s far more common than anyone admits.
Grief doesn’t always arrive on time
We expect grief to show up next to the loss, like at a funeral. But the loss of an identity often doesn’t work that way. You’re busy. You’re functioning. You get the job, raise the kids, keep moving. From the outside you look fine, and you half-believe it yourself. The grief doesn’t go anywhere. It just waits.
Across our interviews this delay shows up again and again. Awareness of what was lost frequently lands years — sometimes ten or fifteen years — after the event that caused it. The danger isn’t the grief. The danger is the gap, the long stretch where something heavy is being carried and never named.
The backpack you never empty
One guest gave me an image I’ve never forgotten. He described how we keep loading things into a backpack and never take anything out: “Don’t just keep putting things in that backpack. Once that backpack’s full, you’re on self-destruct.”
That’s what unprocessed grief does. Every loss, every “I’m fine,” every thing you didn’t deal with goes in the bag, and you keep marching because marching is what you were trained to do. For some people it doesn’t become unbearable until years later, when something finally makes them stop and feel the weight.
Some people reach the edge before they realise
For some, awareness only comes at a crisis point — a moment where everything they’d been carrying finally caught up with them. I’ve spoken with guests who reached that edge, and I’ve been close to it myself. What I want anyone reading this to know is that reaching that point is not the end of the story. People come through it. Acceptance, support and slowly rebuilding a sense of who you are now are not just possible — they’re what the people who recovered all describe.
If you’re somewhere near that edge as you read this, please reach out to one of the lines at the top and bottom of this page. You don’t have to be in crisis to deserve support.
Naming it is the first tool
Grief is not weakness, and it is not disloyalty to a career you loved. Unnamed grief is the risk — not the grief itself. The moment you can say “I think I’m grieving the person I was” is the moment it stops running you from the shadows and becomes something you can actually work with.
That naming is the first stage of regulation in Identity Performance Psychology and the AURIS framework. It took me twelve years to do it. It doesn’t have to take you that long.
If you’ve been carrying something quietly, you’re not alone — and it’s never too late to set it down. Please share this with anyone who needs it.
Start the free AURIS 5-Day Reset: aurisidentity.com
More on the framework behind this: Identity Performance Psychology and the AURIS framework.
If you’re struggling right now, you don’t have to carry it alone. In the UK, Samaritans are free to call any time on 116 123. Veterans and serving personnel can contact Op COURAGE, the NHS veterans’ mental health service. If life is in immediate danger, call 999.