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 brand of misery that doesn't announce itself dramatically. It doesn't arrive with a breakdown or a crisis or anything you could point to and say: there, that's the thing. It arrives, instead, as a kind of flattening. You are technically functioning. The emails get answered. The work gets done. You show up, you perform competence, you even occasionally produce something you don't entirely hate. And yet…something is missing, not from the work, but from you. Some quality of aliveness that used to be there has quietly packed its bags and left without notice.

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.

Yesterday I removed a dusty purple wrap top with pendulous bell sleeves from my wardrobe. I rolled it up small and placed it in a bag, ready to be donated. The poetry of the shirt was very loud. The first and last time I wore it was on a first date at a wine bar with a man from Hinge. He was kind, sensitive, amiable. We saw each other across a few months but this weekend I sent the text that signalled I felt we were on different tracks. He said he understood, and thanked me for my time.

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?