For a long time, I treated emotional needs as a kind of personal weakness. I admired self-sufficiency. Independence. Competence. I wanted to be the person who needed very little from anyone. Many of us do. Sometimes this develops because our needs were inconsistently met growing up. Attachment theory suggests that when caregivers are unavailable, unpredictable, or overwhelmed, children often adapt by minimising their needs in order to preserve connection. We learn that needing is risky. So we become fiercely independent adults who pride ourselves on "having no expectations."

There is a particular kind of grief that arrives when someone brilliant dies young. A collective gasp that then quietly reshapes itself into awe and reverence. We speak of them differently afterwards. We say things like “at the height of their powers” and “a light extinguished too soon” and the eulogies are always, somehow, luminous.

We do not do this for people who die at 84 after a good dinner with people that love them.

Something we don’t talk about is the silent grief cycle embedded in the creative process We talk about blocks. Burnout. Resistance. We romanticise the grind, the breakthrough, the comeback. But beneath all of that, there can be something quieter. Heavier. Grief.

When your creative identity is tethered to a specific skill, and that skill disappears, you do not just lose income. You lose orientation. You lose language for who you are. You lose the way you introduce yourself at parties. Who are you if not that?