On grief, identity, and the grammar we inherit

Note: This article was originally published on Digital Psychedelics, but I am cross-posting it here due to its personal nature.

This is an abstract piece, no specific details. Tell me if you want me to extend it.

Pain is one of the most reliable drivers of awareness we have. That's the claim I want to unfold here, through a pattern I noticed in myself late. Late enough that it had already caused damage, several times, before I understood what I was doing.

Growing up in Colombia, loss was structural. People died. Families were displaced. Relatives disappeared between one chapter and the next without clean endings. Not my relatives, thankfully, but close enough to shape my surroundings. You don't process that as a child. You absorb it as grammar. A set of rules about how closeness works, what it costs, what it tends to become. Without realizing it, I carried that grammar into every relationship that mattered. I reproduced the shape of loss.

Colombia was specific in another way. The collective was the unit. Family, neighborhood, extended belonging. For me that also meant years in the scouting movement, a structured community with explicit values, roles, service as identity. You knew who you were partly because you knew where you stood in relation to others. Identity held in common before it's held individually.

I didn't have the vocabulary for any of this at the time. Robert Kegan would later give me one.

A short detour through Kegan

Kegan describes how the structure of meaning-making itself evolves across a lifetime. Think of it as stages of who's driving the car.[1][2]

• Stage 1, the impulsive mind. Early childhood. You are your impulses. If you want the toy, you want the toy. There's no "me" separate from the wanting. You are the center of the world.
• Stage 2, the imperial mind. Older children, some teenagers, some adults. You have your own needs and plans, and you can pursue them. Other people are mostly instruments or obstacles. You are inside a world.
• Stage 3, the socialized mind. Where most adults stabilize. Identity is shaped by relationships, roles, loyalties, the expectations of the people who matter to you. You are a good son, a reliable friend, a member of your team, your country, your movement. Your identity includes your community.
• Stage 4, the self-authoring mind. Rarer. You become the author of your own values rather than a vessel for inherited ones. You can hold the expectations of others at a distance, examine them, and choose. The focus of your identity is again "you," in a more complex way than stage 2.[3]

That's the frame for the rest of this piece. My life in Latin America, I think, brought me into stage 3, with the collective doing the holding.

The container breaking

When I moved to Europe, the Latino container broke. It needed to.

First Germany, then Sweden. Swedish culture assumes individual autonomy almost as a moral premise. You are responsible for yourself. Others are responsible for themselves. There's dignity in that, and a kind of loneliness that doesn't announce itself. My first real separation.

I learned how to find belonging again, but belonging felt different because it was elective. At K9 Coliving in Stockholm we had a Slack channel called "holdmyhair," a reference to holding someone's hair back while they're sick. The gesture of showing up when someone can't help back. No institutional or family scaffolding, just the decision to be there. That became my new collective.

[Placeholder: I want to write a separate article on what coliving meant to me, the specific texture of it, why it worked, where it failed. This paragraph doesn't do it justice.]

What I didn't see was that the loss template was still running underneath. Attachment that already anticipated its own failure. I was subject to it, embedded in it, unable to see it as one perspective among others.

The rupture

It takes two to tango. Without proper boundaries, attaching to someone can be hurtful, for everyone involved. I've lived versions of this more than once. Two people, each bringing their own grammar of loss to the choreography, dancing toxically, generating as much meaning as damage. It had to happen several times before I got it. I've moved countries, several times by now, in the wake of these dynamics.

That's when theorizing stopped working. The template wasn't something I carried privately. It played out on people, on both sides. I managed to create a tremendous rupture from my collective belonging, through pain, and with it incredible amounts of regret. Saying sorry became a daily routine.

There's a detail in language worth pausing on. "I am sorry" comes from sorrow. In Swedish, "jag är ledsen" literally means "I am sad." Both embed grief into the act of apologizing. I lived that before I noticed the etymology. Heartbreak in these situations is not only received. It's also generated, through the same attachment structure that makes closeness possible in the first place. That is a heavier, more clarifying sorrow.

What that sorrow asked of me was to stay inside it. Not perform it. Not rush toward resolution to relieve the discomfort. Not narrate or analyze my way out. Just hold it. We often replace one feeling with another before the first has done its work. Holding is the refusal to do that. In Kegan's framework, this holding is what makes transformation possible, a change in the form of how you make meaning at all.[5]

The three axes

In a previous piece I mapped conscious experience along three independent axes: alertness versus sedation, entropy versus rigidity, indifference versus engagement. We collapse them constantly. We assume pain is disengaging, or pleasure engaging.

When you sit inside the pain of a relationship that has gone wrong, and refuse to look away, the experience is painful. But if you hold it, it is not chaotic. It becomes highly ordered. And it demands absolute engagement. Grief with meaning. Compare that to pleasurable states that are chaotic and indifferent, certain forms of dissociation or escapism. Suffering and wellbeing are not a single slider.

There's a reason we're drawn to this specific coordinate. Pain brings you to the present. Where meditation and breathwork require discipline, pain does the same work automatically. It roots you in the exact moment. The sorrow I felt was not just a negative emotion. It was an anchor. You see the same logic in "Type 2 fun," experiences miserable in the moment, deeply meaningful in retrospect.

It reframes a cultural paradox I've thought about often. Latino cultures elevate drama and suffering, in romance and in everyday life. Is suffering the same as loving? Is that part of why Colombia, with its violent history, consistently ranks among the happiest nations by Gallup's positive-affect measure? If love and suffering share the same channel of high engagement and deep meaning, then joy and pain are neighbors.

Learning the terrain

So yes, I find myself again focusing on "me," a newfound identity that carries the collective but is also empowered by individuality. I am proud of the journey. I hope adult development comes in many forms, not all mediated through suffering. But if someone is moving through loss, I want to offer a frame for understanding that pain as transformative rather than only corrosive.

I'm not past the pattern. I still recognize it when it activates. What's different is that I can see it, name it, and sometimes choose differently. Sometimes not. Understanding your patterns is not freedom from them. It's learning the terrain. You still have to walk it.

The question has shifted over the years. Less "what does this place offer me?" and more "what does this place ask of me?" A small change in grammar. Maybe the most durable thing sorrow taught.