A few weeks after my dad died, I sat in a work meeting, pen in hand, and felt my eyes slide out of focus. As the conversation moved around me, as my colleagues jostled to have their ideas heard, an unfamiliar feeling settled over me, I didn't care. All the urgency had drained out of it. The meeting, the tasks for that day, my role in it all. None of it mattered. I registered the feeling in real time, and it shocked me. Who am I now? I thought.

Carrie Bradshaw asks a version of the same question in And Just Like That, standing alone at Big's funeral while the room empties around her. Nobody expects a New York sitcom to get grief right, but it does something true there, the disorientation of realising the version of you that existed before this loss simply isn't available anymore.

Was I no longer the ambitious, motivated woman who loved her job and was proud of her career? The question was fundamentally destabilising to my sense of self. But the feeling persisted. I couldn't make myself care anymore, about any of it. A month or so later, I quit.

What I was experiencing was the disorientation of grief, and I was entirely unprepared for it. I expected to be sad or angry; I didn't expect to be confronted with a wholesale reconfiguration of my identity. The things that used to organise my life, career milestones, social rhythms, suddenly felt like they were written in a language I no longer spoke. At first, this registered as personal failure. Maybe I simply couldn't hack the pressure, or I was never as ambitious as I thought I was. But research suggests this kind of rupture is common, bereavement is one of the most disruptive life events, with studies linking it to increased absence, reduced performance and lasting changes in how people relate to their work.

Loss lowered my tolerance for bullshit. Once you've watched someone you love die, it becomes much harder to absorb the daily indignities of work, the performative urgency, the inflated importance, the hierarchies that once felt worth navigating. I wasn't alone in this. And, five years on, I understand it not as failure, but as a recalibration of what matters.

"Our relationship with work and success can shift so substantially after a bereavement because we are confronted with the fragility of life," explains Michelle Moore, leadership coach. "The reframe is in the beauty of the opportunities that come from that shift."

Far from a narrative of failure, Moore believes this overhaul of priorities creates scope to build something more meaningful with your career, more aligned with what you actually care about, rather than what you think you should care about, or how you are perceived by others.

"Grief can make you less afraid to take risks," says Moore. "It can make you more present and attuned to the choices you make about your career. It forces you to think more carefully and deeply about what you want to do with your life, both personally and professionally."

This rings true for me. What initially felt like disengagement at work was actually a sharpening of meaning, not a loss of ambition, but a refusal to spend my time and energy carelessly. Loss lowered my tolerance for bullshit. Once you've watched someone you love die, it becomes much harder to absorb the daily indignities of work, the performative urgency, the inflated importance, the hierarchies that once felt worth navigating. Grief has left me both more vulnerable and more certain, and there is a new kind of clarity in that feeling.

"Your new reality after grief offers you something deeper and more powerful in a work context," says Moore. "Many grievers feel, I've now survived tragedy, I can deal with hard stuff. This is systemic resilience in practice. Loss is the harshest life lesson in self-efficacy."

In the before time, before loss, my career was a central tenet of my personality. I thrived on the prestige of certain roles, on the external validation of perceived success and progression. But grief forces you to zoom out so far that those markers begin to look flimsy. It's a mindset shift that can't be reversed, and I soon found it reshaping not just how I worked, but how I showed up in my relationships too.

It is no secret that grief reshapes friendships. The narrative typically focuses on the relationships that don't survive, on the wrong things people say to grieving friends, on how loss can strain friendships. However, much like with my career, what I actually experienced after bereavement was a deepening of meaning.

"Grief strips away the pressure to pretend everything is okay and provides opportunity to share deeper conversations and emotional responses with one another," explains Dr. Raman Mohabir, licensed counsellor and founder of Good Mourning Mental Health.

"Not every friendship survives a major loss, and while that's painful, it can also make room for relationships that better fit who you are now in the context of your ongoing grief journey."

This is what will define our relationships in our thirties and beyond, not proximity or history, but who shows up when life really starts life-ing.

Losing both of my parents by my mid-30s gave me the unenviable title of Chief of Grief in my social circles. For some, the awfulness of those losses made me unapproachable. They were the friendships that did not survive. But for many more of my friends, it unlocked new levels of support, empathy and connection. For those who stepped up, who kept checking in, even when there was nothing to say, even when I didn't know what I needed, those friendships are better and more meaningful now than they ever were.

"Grief has a way of clarifying relationships," explains Dr. Mohabir. "It provides an opportunity to re-evaluate friendships and reassess our needs as well. When someone feels safe enough to be honest about their pain, and a friend is willing to stay with them, that relationship often develops greater trust, vulnerability, and resilience."

At my mum's funeral, carrying my three-month old baby in my arms, I moved through the guests shell-shocked and blank-faced. Then I noticed a group of university friends. They all have lives of their own. They're based all over the country and I wouldn't have expected them to take time off work and organise childcare so they could attend. Yet here they were. They took my baby and passed him between them so I could breathe. They made me a plate of food when the buffet came out.

Back to Carrie, who has an entire season of moments like that, technically surrounded by Miranda, Charlotte and Seema, and still entirely alone with it in the ways that matter most. Which is exactly why the friends who show up properly, physically, without being asked, matter as much as they do.

The depth of gratitude I felt for these women in this moment is hard to describe. This is friendship. This is what it means. This, I am realising, is what will define our relationships in our thirties and beyond, not proximity or history, but who shows up when life really starts life-ing. As we get older and more friends inevitably join me in the Dead Mum/Dad Club, these are the moments that matter, and I am determined to show up for all of them as they have for me.

Grief rewrites what we are striving for. In the immediate aftermath, the shock of loss can make everything feel meaningless, what you need from both your professional and personal life shifts, often overnight, and that is deeply destabilising. But over time, something steadier takes its place. What once felt urgent falls away, and what remains, the work that feels worth doing, the people who show up and stay, comes into sharper focus. Grief has shown me how to invest in what matters, and let the rest go.