Everyone knows grief and loss. In my experience, creative people feel their losses at a different wavelength than other people. We tend to be more sensitive, perhaps overly. We train ourselves to remember, so what we’ve lost can still seem vivid in our eyes, and the pain always fresh. Creative people tend to have a vision for the future, so we grieve the loss of what we had and what we were supposed to have. A lot of us write through our trauma, hoping to exorcise our demons or figure out a better way to live. And some of us wish we could write a better ending, and so get stuck reliving the past, in search of the moment where it all went wrong.

This doesn’t make us better. Life isn’t a contest of who can feel the deepest or wallow in sadness the longest. It’s just how some of us are. We often use our grief in our work, so our relationship is peculiar.

Of course, I’ve experienced loss as well, death and heartbreak and setbacks. I’ve also experienced grief over creative loss. The biggest didn’t occur all at once. It was only apparent in retrospect.

I lost my tribe.

Four of my most influential writing mentors have died. Two of them died before I’d even graduated from college, and another soon after. The fourth passed away not long after I’d reconnected with him on Facebook. I’d recently moved back to my hometown and never had the chance to see him in person.

When I was in my 20s, I had a group of creative writer and poet friends. We were all young-ish, full of energy, passionate about our work. We had purpose. We published a zine for a couple of years. We were small but mighty. And then my heart needed a change and I moved away, losing touch with most of those people I adored.

I never thought of those friends and mentors as replaceable, but I thought the experience of having a tribe of likeminded writers and artists was replicable. As it turns out, it wasn’t and I learned this only long after the fact, years after I lost my connections with creative folks. It’s difficult losing something or someone in a flash, to have it ripped from you without notice. But it’s also hard to look back and realize that what you had has been lost, without an acknowledgment of its passing. At some point, one of our gatherings was the last one, and I didn’t notice. I always thought there’d be one more or maybe a better one down the line. I’ve rarely burned bridges behind me but I have turned back only to find them crumbled.

What were some of your creative losses? For today, think about your greatest creative loss. It might be a person or group, as mine was. Maybe you lost an opportunity or a specific piece of writing or a diary. Experience what you had and what you felt when the loss was fresh. Remember that you wouldn’t feel that loss if you hadn’t felt love.