Understanding ambiguous loss, cultural identity, and the guilt of grieving a life you chose.
Some days, out of nowhere, there’s an ache you can’t quite explain — a heaviness that doesn’t match anything that just happened. You brush it off, because what is there to be sad about? You have so much to be grateful for.
That’s usually the first sign of a grief no one taught us to recognize. And it usually comes with its own gatekeeper: I chose this. I’m lucky to be here. Other people have it so much harder. So the grief gets pushed down, again and again, until it stops feeling like grief and starts feeling like something is wrong with you.
It isn’t. It’s grief that hasn’t been given anywhere to go.
I know this ache from the inside. I was the first woman in my family to move abroad alone, and for a long time I filed everything I felt under “adjustment” — the isolation, the pressure to succeed, the strange guilt of missing home while living the life I had chosen. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to call it what it actually was: grief.
The Small Trades We Make Every Day
Living abroad, we trade in small ways every day. The food, the clothes, the songs and films we grew up with — slowly set aside, because the people around us often don’t share the same references. It helps us assimilate. I agree.
But quietly, it can start to feel like the parts of you that don’t fit are parts you’re supposed to change. That to belong, you have to become someone a little different — or a little less you.
Maybe you feel guilty for missing home, or guilty for not missing it enough. Maybe you’re the one always translating — not just language, but culture, systems, expectations — for the people you love. Maybe you’ve stopped explaining certain parts of yourself because it takes too much energy to be understood. Or maybe you feel like a visitor in both places: not fully “from here,” and not fully “from there” anymore either.
This grief shows up when something good happens and you wish certain people had been there to see it. When you catch yourself missing a kind of connection that used to feel effortless — and now takes real effort to find.
None of this means something is wrong with you. It means you’re carrying more than most people around you can see.
The Weight of Being the Bridge
For many of us, this grief isn’t only personal — it lives in our relationships. You find yourself explaining this country to your parents, and your parents to your friends. A joke that was effortless in your mother tongue falls flat in translation, so slowly, you stop telling it. A festival that once filled your whole street passes here as an ordinary Tuesday — you’re at work, and nobody around you knows what today is.
And underneath it, a quieter loss: some chapters of your story need so much backstory that you’ve gradually stopped telling them. The street you grew up on. The teacher who changed everything. The way your grandmother said your name. Not because they stopped mattering — but because explaining them from the beginning, every time, is its own kind of tiring.
Carrying two worlds at once is meaningful. It can also be exhausting in a way that’s hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t lived it.
There’s a Name for This: Ambiguous Loss
Psychologists have a name for this experience: ambiguous loss — a term developed by researcher Dr. Pauline Boss to describe grieving something that has changed, even though it hasn’t completely disappeared. The people you miss may still be there. The places you love still exist. But your relationship to them has changed — and that change is its own kind of loss. One that doesn’t get a goodbye, a ritual, or much acknowledgement at all.
That’s part of why it’s so hard to name. There’s no clear ending to point to. Just a quiet, ongoing sense of before and after. And Boss’s work found something many of us feel instinctively: this open-ended kind of loss can be even harder to carry than a definite one, because the world never tells you it’s okay to grieve.
When This Grief Goes Unspoken
Grief that never gets named doesn’t disappear — it shows up sideways. As anxiety that seems to come from nowhere. As burnout that rest doesn’t fix. As a low hum of disconnection, even in good relationships, even in a life that looks full from the outside.
Naming it doesn’t make it vanish. But it changes your relationship to it — from something confusing and heavy into something you understand and can carry differently. You don’t have to convince yourself that leaving was easy in order to be grateful for the life you’ve built. Missing what you left behind doesn’t mean you regret where you are. It means those parts of your life mattered. They still do.
A Few Things That Can Help
🌱 Give it a name, out loud or on paper. Grief with a name takes up less room than grief without one. Even writing “I miss the version of Sunday mornings I used to have” is different from a vague heaviness with no shape.
🌱 Create your own rituals. Traditional grief has its ceremonies and anniversaries; ambiguous loss gets nothing — unless you build something. A dish from home on a certain day. A call at the same time each week. One tradition kept alive, even if no one around you understands it.
🌱 Let both be true. The most exhausting part is often the internal argument — but I’m grateful, but I chose this. Gratitude and grief were never actually in competition. You’re allowed to hold both.
🌱 Find spaces where the quiet parts of you come alive again. A concert in your language, a community that shares your references, one friendship where you don’t have to translate yourself. These moments don’t undo the pain — but for a little while, the parts of you that went quiet get to feel alive again.
You Don’t Have to Carry This Quietly
This is the kind of grief that’s hard to put into words, and easy to minimize on your own. As a first-generation immigrant, Registered Social Worker, and psychotherapist, I work with adults navigating immigration, cultural identity, anxiety, and burnout — including the parts of the experience that don’t have a clean vocabulary yet. In our sessions, there’s no need to justify why your grief and your gratitude coexist. Both get to be true at the same time.
I offer therapy in person in London, Ontario, and virtually across the province — in English, Malayalam, Hindi, and Urdu, because therapy lands differently in the language that feels like home. Sessions are covered by most extended health plans that include RSW services.
Whatever your roots — if this is you too, I see what you’re carrying. You’re welcome to reach out. You don’t need the right words or a perfect time to begin.
Book a free 15-minute consultation
Questions I Hear Often
Is it normal to feel grief after immigrating, even if I chose to leave?
Yes. Choosing to leave doesn’t cancel out what was left behind. Grief after immigration is a well-documented, deeply common experience — including for people whose lives objectively improved. Choice and loss can live inside the same decision.
What is ambiguous loss?
Ambiguous loss is grief over something that has changed but hasn’t fully disappeared — relationships that continue at a distance, places that still exist but are no longer part of daily life, a version of yourself that lived in another context. Because there’s no clear ending, this grief often goes unrecognized — by others, and by the person carrying it.
How do I know if therapy could help with immigration-related grief?
If you notice persistent anxiety, burnout that rest doesn’t touch, guilt about missing home (or not missing it), or a disconnection you can’t quite explain, therapy can be a place to name what you’re carrying without having to justify it. You don’t need a crisis to begin — sometimes the most healing work is simply making the invisible weight visible.