I'm Not Who I Was—Loss Made Sure of That
Updated: Aug 4
The Colors You Become After Loss: How Grief Changes Your Personality
Hey there, it’s me, Jen. If there’s a frequent-flyer program for surviving annual rounds of structural collapse, I’m overdue for my upgrade. Apparently, 2024 was “Lose Your Foundation” year, 2025 was “Eviscerate Your Soul Mate” year, and 2026 said, “Hold my beer—let’s take another one of your best friends and the dog, too.”
Some mornings, I wake up half-convinced Ashton Kutcher is about to jump out from behind the refrigerator with a film crew. I keep waiting for someone to yell, “Gotcha!” and tell me that Greg's father, his best friend Stacey, his sister LaNell, my Dad, my husband and soul mate, my treasured friend Tiffany, and my sweet boy Gilly are all just hanging out in a green room eating craft services, and this was all an elaborate, two-year social experiment in psychological torture.
Please.
Cue the cameras.
I’m ready for the punchline.
Except nobody jumps out. The coffee brews. The house is too quiet. And I’m left staring at the mirror, wondering who the hell I am now. Losing your soul mate—and your dad, and your husband’s father, and his best friend Stacey, and his sister LaNell, and your treasured friend Tiffany, and your loyal pup Gilly—doesn’t just break your heart.
It rewires your entire personality.
And that’s the thing nobody tells you: after that much loss, you don’t just grieve the people you loved—you grieve the person you were before it all happened.
The Colors of Grief: A New Palette
You start to notice the colors you’ve become, the shades grief paints into your personality without asking permission. When I talk about “colors,” I’m using the True Colors framework Tiffany loved—the language she used to understand people. I recently retook the test, and I land in Orange/Green, with a thread of Gold woven through—which honestly tracks. Tiffany always said True Colors captured me better than any of the other color systems.
And grief doesn’t just shift those colors—it deepens them, distorts them, drags new shades to the surface you didn’t know you had.
When you Love BIG, your hurt is even BIGGER.
The Dad Chapter: The Death of Small Talk and Patience
My dad wasn’t just my biggest fan; he was the President of my Fan Club. When I was little, he took me everywhere—visiting shut-ins from his church congregation, watching him play basketball with his buddies, running errands that didn’t require a sidekick but always included one anyway. He understood me without translation, without explanation, without me having to soften or shrink or decode myself.
He loved me with a kind of uncomplicated, steadfast, pure love—the kind that becomes part of your wiring. It becomes the baseline of who you are.
And he brought out my Orange.
The boldness.
The spontaneity.
The quick-to-act, jump-in-the-car, let’s-go version of me.
He made adventure feel safe. He made risk feel supported. He made my confidence feel earned. When he was alive, my Orange didn’t feel reckless—it felt rooted. It felt like joy.
How it changed me: When you lose the president of your fan club, your operational baseline collapses. My patience for trivialities evaporated overnight. If someone complains to me about a bad hair day, slow Wi-Fi, or self-manufactured drama, my internal monologue is basically a heavy metal concert of pure rage.
Because I didn’t just lose my dad.
I lost someone who loved me BIG.
I lost the person who made my Orange feel invincible.
And when you lose someone who loved you that big, the hurt is bigger than anything small talk can touch. My tolerance for nonsense didn’t just shrink—it disintegrated. Oddly, it’s liberating. When you’ve survived the unthinkable, you stop sweating the small stuff because you finally understand how aggressively short and fragile life is.
The Greg Chapter: Losing Your Person and the Anatomy of an Inexplainable Loss
If losing my dad was losing the foundation, losing Greg—my best friend, lover, confidant, and soul mate after 32 years—was the demolition of the entire universe.
Thirty-two years isn’t just a relationship; it’s a lifetime built brick by brick. He knew every version of me, every flaw, every inside joke, every coffee preference before I even knew myself. He was my anchor, my home, my safe place, my luggage carrier, my necklace clasper, and SO much more.
Trying to explain the magnitude of that loss is like trying to describe the color blue to someone who has been blind since birth. Words fail.
Greg didn’t just love me.
He loved me BIG.
The kind of big that becomes your oxygen.
How it changed me: When your soul mate is ripped away after three decades, it doesn’t just change your personality—it alters your atomic structure. Small talk becomes nails on a chalkboard. People-pleasing? Burned to ashes. I used to care about making everyone comfortable. Now I measure my day by whether I had to interact with anyone who uses the phrase “it is what it is” unironically.
You become fiercely protective of your peace. The fear of losing someone else becomes instinct. You aren’t rude—you’re living in the aftermath of an emotional earthquake.
Greg had that true Golden Retriever kind of soul—steady, loyal, warm, all-in. The kind of man whose presence felt like safety, whose laugh softened the edges of a hard day, whose devotion showed up in a hundred quiet ways. He loved with his whole heart, without hesitation, without games, without distance.
Being loved by him felt like coming home.
And losing him didn’t just take away my partner—it took away the gentlest, most grounding energy in my life.
The Confidence Chapter: Losing the Voices That Steadied Me
There’s another part of losing my dad and Greg that I don’t talk about enough: it shook my confidence in myself. Both of them were the kind of men who didn’t just love me—they believed in me. They supported my decisions, trusted my instincts, and when I was off-base, they didn’t hesitate to gently (or not so gently) redirect me.
My dad listened in a way that made everything feel solvable. Greg challenged me in a way that made everything feel clear. They were the mirrors I checked my thinking against, the voices that helped me trust myself.
When you lose the people who consistently reflect your strengths back to you, decisions feel heavier. Doubt creeps in where confidence used to live. You start second-guessing things you never used to question, not because you don’t trust yourself, but because the voices that helped you trust yourself are gone.
It’s not that I don’t know who I am.
It’s that the two people who helped anchor that identity aren’t here to steady the boat.
The Gilligan Chapter: The Final Straw and the Fear of Loving Again
Just when I thought my emotional armor was fully forged, 2026 sauntered in and said, “Hold my beer—let’s take the dog, too.”
Gilly wasn’t just a dog; he was Avery’s first puppy. He arrived in 2014 with Bordetella and a near-death experience that cost thousands before he even settled in. But he was stubborn enough to survive and lived to twelve and a half—roughly 87 in human years, making him the geriatric king of the castle.
He loved us with that uncomplicated, bobbed-tail-wagging, full-body devotion that sneaks into your heart and builds a home there without asking permission.
And I loved him BIG.
Naturally, because the universe loves drama, he began declining the exact week I left for vacation. Coordinating his care from afar while my kids faced the decision together was a special kind of agony. Coming home to a house where he wasn’t waiting for me was an absolute gut-punch.
How it changed me: This is where compounding loss breaks your brain. I now hesitate at the thought of ever bringing another dog into my life—not because I don’t love animals, but because I get too attached. The depth of my love has become directly proportional to the terror of losing it.
When you Love BIG, you Lose BIG.
And after losing my dad, my soul mate, and my most loyal pup, the fear of losing anyone—or anything—else feels unbearably heavy.
The Color Chapter: When Loss Shifts Your Personality Palette
On my recent girls’ beach trip with Becca and Jen, we ended up talking about our personality “colors”—something our sweet Tiffany was absolutely obsessed with. She lived and breathed the “True Colors” personality test and loved assigning each of us our shades like she was the keeper of some cosmic emotional paint deck. She didn’t just know our colors; she saw them. She could look at you mid-conversation and say, “That’s your Green showing,” or “Your Orange is peeking through,” or “Your Gold is glowing today,” and somehow she was always right.
When I took the "True Colors" test, I was always an Orange/Green/Gold blend: intuitive and analytical at my core, bold and capable when life demanded it, with just enough Gold to keep things steady. Tiffany loved that about me. She said my palette was “sunlight with a to-do list.”
But sitting there with the girls, laughing and crying and missing her so fiercely, I realized something I hadn’t said out loud yet:
I don’t feel like the same colors anymore.
Losing Stacey shifted our entire Tribe.
Losing my dad shifted something in me.
Losing Greg shifted something bigger.
Losing Tiffany shifted something deeper.
And losing Gilly—my constant, loyal, tail-wagging shadow—shifted something quieter but just as real.
My Orange—the part of me that was bold, adventurous, quick to act—feels dimmer now. Not gone, but quieter. More cautious. More measured. More aware of how fragile everything is.
My Green—the part of me that was intuitive, analytical, big-picture, able to make sense of chaos—feels heavier now. Less curious, more guarded. Loss has a way of making even your insight feel like a burden. The part of me that used to connect dots effortlessly now hesitates, second-guesses, overthinks. Grief doesn’t just quiet your Orange; it complicates your Green.
My Gold—the part of me that was structured, confident, steady—has cracks in it. Not because I’m unstable, but because the people who reinforced my instincts and steadied my decisions aren’t here to do that anymore. My dad and Greg didn’t just love me; they helped me trust myself.
And even though Orange/Green are my dominant colors, Greg had a way of bringing out my Gold—the grounded, steady part of me that felt strongest when he was beside me. He was a true Gold himself, with Green right behind it, and his reliability became part of my nervous system. Losing him didn’t just shake my Gold; it shifted the whole foundation it used to rest on.
And Tiffany? She was the one who helped me understand myself through the lens of color—who reminded me that my strengths were vibrant, my quirks were intentional, and my personality was something to celebrate. Tiffany was a TRUE BLUE—deep-feeling, intuitive, connection-driven to her core. Losing her feels like losing the person who helped me interpret my own palette. She was the prism that made my light make sense.
Even Gilly played a part in that. He grounded me. He softened me. He reminded me daily that I was someone worth following, worth trusting, worth loving. When you lose a creature who adored you with that kind of uncomplicated devotion, it changes the way you see yourself.
When you lose the people—and the pup—who help you see yourself clearly, your colors shift.
Your palette changes.
Your internal compass recalibrates.
And when you Love BIG, even your colors Change BIG.
I’m still me—but I’m a different shade of me.
A quieter Orange.
A heavier Green.
A cracked-but-resilient Gold.
And maybe even a deeper Blue than I ever had before—the kind that comes from loving hard, losing hard, and feeling everything in a way I never used to.
A woman whose colors have been altered by grief, but not erased by it.
A Quick Detour: The Truth About Compounded Grief
Before I shift into the complicated territory of intimacy and fear, I need to name something bigger. Because the last few years didn’t just take my dad and my soulmate. They took SEVEN souls dear to me—including one loyal, stubborn, geriatric pup who was woven into the fabric of our family.
In the span of about two years, I’ve had to say goodbye to my father-in-law, Tom; our best friend, Stacey; my dad, Dan; my sister-in-law, LaNell; my soulmate, Greg; my dear friend, Tiffany; and yes—my sweet boy, Gilly, just last week.
It’s not just grief. It’s compounded grief. It’s the weight of seven different worlds ending, all stacked on top of each other.
I wrote about this more deeply in Compounded Grief: When the Waves Won’t Stop Crashing, because there’s no way to understand the person I am now without understanding the sheer volume of loss that reshaped me.
And here’s the part that matters for what comes next: When you’ve lived through that many endings, you don’t just grieve differently—
You love differently.
You protect differently.
You hesitate differently.
Which leads directly into the next truth.
That’s the thing about losing seven souls dear to you: it doesn’t just change your colors—it changes how close you let anyone get to them.
Grief shifts your palette, but it also shifts your boundaries.
It teaches you that attachment is beautiful…and terrifying.
The Man Chapter: The Quiet Fear of Letting Someone Close Again
Here’s the part I haven’t said loudly enough: losing Greg didn’t just break my heart—it changed how I relate to intimacy itself. The idea of letting a man close again feels different now, heavier in a way I never expected.
It’s not that I don’t want companionship. I miss being seen. I miss being known. I miss the ease of sharing a life with someone who understands my rhythms without needing a manual. But the fear sits right underneath all of that.
Not fear of dating.
Not fear of rejection.
Fear of attachment.
Because I know how I love.
I know the size of my heart.
I know the depth of my loyalty.
And I know exactly how it felt when the person I loved BIG was suddenly gone.
So now, when someone shows interest, my instinct isn’t excitement—it’s caution. Not because I’m closed off, but because I’m still healing from the last time I handed someone my whole heart.
I’m not afraid of love.
I’m afraid of BIG love.
Because BIG love comes with BIG loss.
And I don’t know if I have another BIG loss left in me.
The Aftermath: Living in the New Architecture
They say adversity builds character. What they don’t mention is that sometimes it demolishes the original architecture, pours concrete over the foundation, and forces you to live in an entirely different building with a wildly sarcastic security guard at the door.
Spoiler: that guard is me now.
I look in the mirror, and the woman staring back isn’t the one who existed before all this.
She’s tougher.
She’s sharper.
She’s quieter in some ways and louder in others.
She carries an immense depth that people who haven’t walked this path simply cannot see.
Because the old me loved BIG.
And the old me hurt BIG.
And the old me didn’t survive the storm.
We keep waiting for the old us to return—not realizing she’s gone. She didn’t make it through the losses, the shockwaves, the empty rooms, the decisions made alone. But the woman who did… she’s someone I’m learning in real time, the way you learn a new scar or a new strength you didn’t ask for.
She’s tougher in ways that aren’t loud, sharper in ways that aren’t cruel, and softer in ways that come from knowing exactly how quickly a life can change.
She doesn’t waste time.
She doesn’t entertain nonsense.
She doesn’t pretend she’s still the woman who lived in the world before everything broke open.
The new me might not have patience for your bad day—but she carries the weight of seven worlds ending and still stands. She knows how to walk through fire without burning down. She knows how to rebuild a life from pieces no one else can see. She knows how to keep going when the map is gone and the compass is grief.
She’s not waiting for the old version of herself to come back.
She’s learning to trust the woman who survived.
A Note from Jen
If you’re reading this as a widow, a widower, someone who’s lost a spouse or partner, someone who’s lost a parent, a friend, a sibling, or a companion animal who felt like family—or as a parent who has lost a child—I want you to know something that most people don’t say out loud: you’re not imagining the ways you’ve changed.
Grief doesn’t just break your heart.
It rewires your identity.
It shifts your personality, your instincts, your confidence, your patience, your softness, your edges. It changes how you show up in relationships, how you make decisions, how you protect yourself, and how you see the person you’ve become.
And it doesn’t matter who you lost — a spouse, a partner, a child, a parent, a sibling, a friend, or a loyal animal who was woven into your daily life. When someone who shaped your world is gone, the world inside you changes too.
You’re not “too emotional.”
You’re not “too guarded.”
You’re not “too different.”
You’re not failing at healing.
You’re evolving.
You’re becoming someone shaped by love, loss, survival, and truth—not by who you were expected to be before your life cracked open.
You don’t have to rush back to who you were.
You don’t have to apologize for who you are now.
You don’t have to pretend your losses didn’t alter your wiring.
You’re allowed to grow in the aftermath.
You’re allowed to soften.
You’re allowed to sharpen.
You’re allowed to become someone new.
And you’re allowed to trust the person who survived.
Journal Prompts: How Grief Changes Who You Are
These prompts are for widows, widowers, parents who’ve lost a child, and anyone navigating deep loss—anyone trying to understand the identity shifts that come with grief. Use them to explore how loss has reshaped your personality, your patterns, your colors, and your sense of self.
1. Name the shifts
Who were you before your loss—your habits, your strengths, your quirks, your colors? What feels different now? What parts of you have dimmed, sharpened, softened, or cracked open?
2. Reflect on your anchors
Who were the people who helped you trust yourself—your spouse, your partner, your child, your parent, your friend? What did they reflect back to you? How has losing them changed the way you make decisions or see your own strengths?
3. Explore your emotional reflexes
What reactions or instincts show up now that didn’t before—caution, impatience, protectiveness, tenderness, fear, clarity? How do these new reflexes shape your daily life or relationships?
4. Identify your new colors
If your personality had a palette, what colors feel stronger now? Which ones feel quieter? Which ones feel cracked but still present? What new shades have emerged since your loss?
5. Honor the person you’ve become
Write about the version of you who made it through—their resilience, their boundaries, their softness, their strength. What do you appreciate about them? What are they still learning?
My Precious Daughter, my Firstborn*
Your Gold has been tried by Fire!💥 Now, 24K (Five nines fine)~~ Lovingly, Momma