Diane Daniel grieved when her husband transitioned to become Selina Lok, her now wife. In 2011, Lok told ABC News, “I had the strange realization that I was at a birthday party, and [my wife] was at a funeral.” Like Daniel and Lok, discussion around grief and transition rarely centers the person transitioning.

From personal essays to podcast episodes and articles, the grief around transitioning trends to center spouses, friends and family members.

In The New York Times essay “Celebrate Your Kid’s Transition. Don’t Grieve It,” Filipinx trans author Meredith Talusan writes: “What is often left unspoken is that a trans person is expected to provide emotional support through this grieving process. Not only does this expectation posit that being transgender is a trans person’s fault, but it also fails to account for the fact that transitioning is likely to be many times more difficult for the trans person than for any loved one.”

Resources and language for grief in transition tend to cater to the people who aren’t transitioning.

When a loved one transitions, according to TransHub, “working through the changes may involve acknowledging and recognizing grief or feelings of loss. This experience is sometimes referred to as ‘ambiguous loss’, which is a form of grief that doesn’t have the closure that other forms of grief may take on or leaves the sense of being unresolved.”

The truth is: trans, nonbinary and gender nonconforming people grieve themselves, too. In honor of National Grief Awareness Day, trans and gender nonconforming people turn the conversation around, sharing with Reckon their own grievances of transitioning—even in pursuit of gender euphoria.

University of South Florida’s social media strategist Noah Noonan moved from one LGBTQ community and to another. Noonan, who is a white transmasculine nonbinary person, grieves leaving their previous community of queer women. At large, they mourn womanhood.

“There is something so special about girlhood and womanhood and having grown up in that for 20 something years,” they told Reckon, adding that spaces of queer women specifically were crucial to their upbringing—even though they’re separated from it now. “As I discovered who I really was and had top surgery and [started] taking hormones, I slowly felt like I did not belong in those spaces anymore. In a way, that was difficult because I still had a deep love for these spaces.”

A journalist who is also a white transmasculine person and wished to be anonymous feels similarly to Noonan, grieving a life wherein they were socialized as a cis woman.

Having left Fort Wayne, Ind. in their 20s, they told Reckon that “if I hadn’t [left], I would just be a woman approaching 30 who might be thinking about parenthood.” Now, instead of thinking about what their potential children’s names would be, they’re thinking about what their own chosen name can be.

“I was so endlessly, ceaselessly sad in Indiana and I felt like I had this stone that was weighing me down and I was always sort of sinking,” said the trans journalist, who now lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. “Being in community with other trans and queer people, I realized that the stone was literally not a stone, [but] a thousand knots that I could untie. And untying them is very difficult and confusing, and not a perfect science.”

For them, the feeling of untying knots came up recently when their Instagram algorithm made them a reel of old photos with Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For?” which became the anthem for the recent box office hit Barbie, a story of Barbie’s own journey of self-doubt in the face of self-discovery.

“Because we are in this version of society where trans people are really surveilled, mocked and harassed in the media, we feel a huge pressure to own our choices and to never pontificate,” said the journalist, who upon watching the Instagram reel of themself and said, “I used to be very beautiful—and I don’t hate her; I’m just not that anymore, so it’s a lot of private silent grief because I don’t really want to talk about that with my friends [who might take my feelings the wrong way].”

Gomez Alejo is an Indigenous, two-spirit artist, activist and horror enthusiast based in the Twin Cities, Minn. Alejo went through a tumultuous coming out process with their mother several years ago.

“Grief and I are very familiar with one another,” Alejo said. From mourning the safe childhood they never got to experience and losing family to gun violence—even witnessing a friend getting wheeled out of school in a body bag after taking his own life due to years of transphobia—Alejo explained that “it feels almost like grief and I have grown up together, like I’ve always carried around a sliver of it in my back pocket.”

Two months from now will mark one year since Alejo cut off their mother from their life.

“While my life has gotten significantly more peaceful, I still find myself mourning that relationship,” they said. “I haven’t fully figured out what exactly is causing the grief, but I’d recognize its touch anywhere, so I know it’s there.”

To their benefit, they believe that the grief has been worthwhile, that “removing those that brought danger and discomfort to my life made room for others to bring safety, comfort, and community. With community comes acceptance, and with acceptance comes love. I know this is going to sound corny, but I fully believe love is what makes me brave.”

Oli Wilder was unable to consider transitioning as possible until they found their footing, financially and mentally. Wilder is a Black nonbinary writer and philosopher working in tech in Atlanta, Ga.

“I [had gotten] a stable job with a good healthcare plan, and I’d cut the last of my toxic biological family ties. It always felt right, but this was the first time it felt possible.”

Wilder feels like they’ve been in transition since they were a kid, agonizing over the disparity between who they knew themself to be and who they would be accepted as.

“I have Major Depressive Disorder and, when I was very young, I struggled with inexplicable grief,” they said. “I grieved the loss of relationships—with friends and with family. And I held deep, unrelenting grief for my future myself; everyday felt like I was waking up to my own funeral, like I was preemptively mourning the loss of the life I could’ve had if I were just wired differently.”

They describe grief as a “monster” of “people I thought would love me forever but who were incapable of loving me properly.” Above all, Wilder grieves safety and all physical and social markers that had let them move through the world with a modicum of greater comfort than they can now.

When Kaidon Ho went through a breakup several months ago over the relationship not being “traditional,” she sobbed for hours. Ho is a Korean American trans creative with Texas and Seoul roots. Currently, she works as a fashion buyer for a fashion tech company in Los Angeles, Cali. She tells Reckon that she didn’t cry because she was sad, but that she cried because she felt tremendous guilt for her inner child.

“I felt so guilty for my inner child—that I’ve made myself so small and someone to be ashamed of,” she said, adding that she felt inclined to hide “masculine” parts of herself. “Even when I started transitioning because I wanted to explore my own femininity, body and sexuality, this whole process became a subject of men’s desires.”

Ho adds that transfeminine people experience grief far more than the rest of the LGBTQ community, given that trans people are over four times more likely than cisgender people to be victims of violent crime, according to the Williams Institute—a majority of whom are Black and Latinx trans women.

“The fact that I compensated my intrinsic self for a male gaze, the death of my inner child and negligence of her is the most loss I’ve experienced,” she said.

She tells Reckon that these days, she has reclaimed all of her power, love and energy she gave that was never reciprocated. “[I’ve] never felt so empowered in my whole life until now.”

According to Wilder, cis people imagine that they go into the future with a greater degree of certainty than trans and nonbinary people do, “but the truth is that we are all wayfinding all the time—or, at least, we ought to be,” they said.

“On the other side of all this pain, grief and sorrow, I will know that I tried to find myself and breathe life into that person,” Wilder added. “That’s all that I want, really, is the trust and the freedom and the latitude to try. To make space for others to try. To try for those before me who couldn’t.”