The Compounded Grief That Comes With Unmasking and Healing
By Dennis Tran
“To unmask is to finally feel; to grieve is to finally honor what was once suppressed.”
For a long time, I thought grief only followed death. No one told me it could arrive quietly in the pauses between transitions, in the endings that weren’t expected or defined, in the versions of myself I outgrew but never properly said goodbye to.
When I began unmasking 5 years ago and began in my healing journey, releasing the survival strategies I had built as a late-identified autistic and ADHD queer Vietnamese American man, I expected to feel light and free. What I didn’t expect was grief: the kind that shows up in silence after years of noise, or the weight that settles in once you finally stop ignoring it and finally face it.
The Many Faces of Grief
Grief has never looked one way. It shapeshifts, showing up in the loss of people, places, things, experiences, possibilities, and even identities.
There’s the grief of change, when life moves faster than our minds, bodies, and hearts can catch up.
The grief of identity, when we realize who we were pretending to be just to belong.
The grief of unrealized potential, wondering who we might have been if we had the language of a diagnosis, health condition, or safety.
The grief of relationships, when friendships fade, partners drift, or family ties unravel, or simply the loss of a loved one.
The grief of stability of what we know, the life that we were living, the job we worked in.
And the collective grief, the mourning we feel for the world as we witness loss, injustice, and disconnection.
For many of us, these layers don’t happen one at a time; they compound. That’s what experts call cumulative or compounded grief, the kind that builds with every unprocessed loss, resurfacing again and again.
Sometimes grief doesn’t roar. It hums beneath the surface, waiting for you to slow down long enough to feel it.
Family, Death, and the Disconnection That Followed
Some grief sits quietly in the background of our lives, the kind we never got permission to name.
When my dad passed away, I had just wrapped up elementary school. I didn’t know what grief was, or how to feel it.
At that age, I didn’t have the emotional language or support to understand what I had lost, not just a parent, but the foundation of safety and belonging that every child deserves. I just knew that the world suddenly felt quieter, and that something I didn’t know how to name had disappeared.
At that time, I saw emotional outbursts and fights among adults that led me to keep things to myself. So, I went back to school, acted “fine,” and tucked that pain away in a corner I wouldn’t return to for decades.
6 years later, when my grandma passed away, the grief hit differently. She had been the glue, the one who kept our fractured family together through food, rituals, and patience. When she was gone, it wasn’t just her I lost; it was everyone.
Without her, my dad’s side of the family became distant, disconnected, unreachable. Even if they were the damage has already been done, years of unresolved trauma have erupted.
It felt like the death of family itself, the loss of connection, of shared language, of being known.
My dad had lived with disability and neurodivergence his whole life, a creative, spiritual man who faced constant shame and judgment in a culture that didn’t understand difference.
He was a poet, teacher, and psychic reader, but to many, he was treated as someone to pity.
When I lost part of my vision as a teenager and became partially blind, I began to understand his pain. I inherited not just his disability but the grief that came with it, the grief of being misunderstood, dismissed, pitied, and feared. And for years, I carried it silently, too, not realizing how deep those roots went.
It wasn’t until my late twenties, after being diagnosed as autistic, that I finally began to feel.
For the first time, I had words, not just for my neurodivergence, but for my emotions.
That diagnosis cracked something open. It permitted me to grieve not only my father and grandmother, but the childhood and connection I never got to have. It took me two decades to meet my own grief.
Friendship Fade and the Grief of Transition
Then there’s the grief that sneaks in through transitions, the friendships that fade as life chapters shift: school to work, work to something new, shared routines replaced by different rhythms. It’s not dramatic; it’s gradual, unanswered texts, changing priorities, the quiet distance that happens when everyone’s just trying to survive.
However, some relationships end due to incompatibility or simply because you outgrow them, and they just no longer fit the version you have evolved into.
There’s also the grief of job and community loss, the co-workers who once felt like family, the inside jokes and creative sparks that dissolve when a chapter closes. When you lose a role, you don’t just lose work; you lose the daily ecosystem of belonging that came with it.
Each ending is a small death, and those deaths accumulate; they echo. We rarely grieve the slow losses, the ones that fade without closure, the people who simply drift away.
Unmasking, Late Neurodivergence, and the Grief of Realization
Unmasking, peeling away the parts of ourselves we built to survive, comes with its own mourning.
When I was finally identified as autistic and ADHD 5 years ago, I grieved the decades of misunderstanding. The times I was told I was “too much” or “too sensitive.” The burnout or overstimulation is mistaken for laziness. The exhaustion of always adapting to a world not built for me.
Diagnosis didn’t erase the pain; it reframed it. It revealed that what I once labeled as personal failure was often systemic, the byproduct of navigating ableism, stigma, and cultural silence.
But with that clarity came grief for the years spent surviving instead of living, for the opportunities missed, for the younger self who kept going anyway.
To unmask is to feel again, to sit in the tenderness you once numbed just to survive.
Collective and Cumulative Grief in an Unstable World
We’re not just grieving individually, we’re grieving collectively. We are living through a time when people are losing jobs, health insurance, and benefits, when housing costs rise faster than wages, and many are one emergency away from losing everything. We’re watching friends and families struggle to pay bills, face health challenges without care, and navigate homelessness in growing numbers.
It’s hard not to feel like the ground beneath us is constantly shifting, like safety and stability are illusions. We are witnessing, in real time, the unraveling of systems that were supposed to protect us. And the grief of watching the world crumble in front of us is its own kind of heartbreak.
But as much as grief reveals what’s fragile, it also reveals what’s essential: connection, compassion, and community. Nothing in life is permanent. Change is constant. People come and go. But the presence, this moment, this breath, this shared humanity is what matters most.
When we slow down enough to notice the present, we make space for something else to take root: gratitude. Because even in the chaos, better things come, things that align more deeply with who we’re becoming.
Sometimes, what crumbles is what is needed to fall away to make room for growth. In a world that feels uncertain, staying grounded in gratitude and connection is an act of defiance, and of love.
Finding Comfort in Glimmers and Community
Healing isn’t the absence of grief; it’s learning how to hold it with tenderness.
Some days, that looks like crying. Other days, it looks like laughing with friends who feel like home.
Over time, I’ve learned to notice glimmers, small flashes of light that remind me that joy and grief can coexist:
Waking up each day with gratitude
A text from someone who truly gets it
The smell of home-cooked meals
Interaction online with strangers, creators, and media
Laughter that loosens something inside my chest
Little signs from the universe that I am on the right track in many different forms that keep me going
Community keeps me grounded, the peers, advocates, and chosen family who hold space for my complexity.
Through all of these moments and connections that are present, grief softens. It doesn’t disappear, but it stops feeling like something I have to carry alone. Grief is love with nowhere to go until community gives it a place to rest.
What I’ve Learned Along the Way
These aren’t answers, just gentle reminders:
Name what’s unspoken. Silence keeps grief alive. Naming it gives it shape and breath.
Let yourself feel. You don’t need to earn the right to emotion. Feeling is healing.
Seek spaces of safety. Community care transforms isolation into belonging.
Redefine healing. It’s not about moving on; it’s about moving with what remains.
Notice the glimmers. Even in grief, life keeps whispering, “I’m still here.”
Find gratitude. Even in uncertainty, the present moment holds quiet abundance if you look closely.
Unmasking, loss, death, instability, identity, endings, all of it has taught me that grief isn’t an interruption to life. It is life. It’s love that has changed form. Its memory and meaning are intertwined.
The grief of my father and grandmother. The loss of friendships, jobs, and communities that once anchored me. The grief of time, vision, and versions of myself I’ll never get back.
And now, the collective grief of watching a world in flux, fragile, uncertain, but still full of possibility.
Through it all, I’ve learned this: nothing is guaranteed. Change is the only constant.
But within that impermanence lies the opportunity to grow, to love deeper, to live slower, to show up with compassion.
Grief doesn’t mean brokenness. It means you’ve cared enough to feel. And somewhere within that ache, if you stay still long enough, you’ll find comfort in presence, in community, and in the small glimmers of hope that remind you: You’re still here.
“Healing isn’t about forgetting. It’s about finding comfort in the present, peace in the in-between, and love in what remains, one day, one breath, one moment at a time.”
 | A guest post by
|