In physics, energy cannot be created or destroyed; it can only change form. A system that appears to lose something has not lost it; it has converted it into a state that is less visible, or less familiar, or simply no longer recognisable as the thing it used to be.

I have been contemplating whether loss in human life follows a similar pattern. I don’t believe in simple comforts. “Everything happens for a reason” is a phrase that has caused more harm than most realise. But because I have lived enough now to notice a distinction that I think matters enormously and is rarely named directly.

There is loss that transforms, and there is loss that is taken; they are not the same experience. They do not evoke the same grief, nor do they heal through the same process.

Consider the daughter who watches her mother and makes a personal promise: I will not be like that. She doesn’t yet grasp what she’s witnessing; she sees the exhaustion, the self-erasure, how her mother has stopped buying things for herself, and how she looks like someone who’s slowly been depleting a resource without replenishing it. The daughter notes these things as warnings, choices she will refuse to make.

What she doesn’t yet understand is the neuroscience behind what she is experiencing. When a baby is placed in a new mother’s arms, cortisol levels spike. The amygdala adjusts its threat detection towards this new life. The brain undergoes biological changes that no promise made before birth could have fully anticipated.

The woman she was doesn’t completely disappear; instead, she takes a step back, allowing the mother to emerge. Interestingly, this new mother resembles the woman she once observed and judged.

This isn’t failure but simply the cycle moving the way it’s meant to. The daughter had to not understand her mother so that she could, one day, understand her from inside the experience.

The loss of her younger self’s certainty, “I will be different”, converts into something more nuanced: an understanding of what love costs when it is chosen completely, and what it looks like from the inside versus the outside.

The same pattern runs through many of the losses I have examined in my own life. A laugh that used to carry across rooms, genuine, loud, generous, that died slowly under the weight of rooms that could not hold it.

I grieved it, and then I found, in its place, something more protected: a smile that does not spend itself on spaces that never asked for the gift. The conversion was painful. But it was a conversion, not a disappearance.

In anthropological terms, this process has been observed across virtually every human culture that has developed a language for it. The “Stoics” called it “amor fati”, the love of what is necessary.

Buddhist traditions name it impermanence, and teach that suffering arises not from loss itself but from resistance to the conversion. The Zulu concept of Ubuntu, “I am because we are”, contains within it the understanding that individual identity is not fixed but relational, always in the process of dying into something more collective and more complete.

Natural loss, in other words, is not a malfunction of life.

It is the mechanism by which a life deepens.

I want to share a story about a girl I met during my volunteer work. I won’t use her name. She was beautiful and kind, but she refused to eat any food that was offered to her. Instead, whenever someone brought her a meal, she would run away and search for garbage instead.

Before I arrived, the local clinicians had attempted intervention for two weeks, but the orphanage staff was at a loss regarding how to help her. The working diagnosis was a dissociative response to her previous living situation, which was known to have been dangerous.

The proposed solution was to remove the boy who typically brought her food, in order to eliminate the trigger for her behaviour. I did not have a clinical framework, but what I had was time, observation, and a willingness to follow her logic rather than immediately replacing it with mine. I watched her for a week before I touched anything.

What I observed was that it wasn’t the boy who was the issue; it was the sequence of events. Her nervous system had learned through sustained trauma in a previous home that any offering from a male presence marked the beginning of a transaction.

To her, acceptance meant owing something in return. It conveyed the idea that “kindness had a price.” Her body had learned to refuse the gift entirely rather than risk the cost.

I changed the sequence, but not the participants. Every time the boy brought food, and she refused it, I ate the food in front of her, without comment or performance. It was simply a matter of food existing, someone receiving it, and nothing else following. After I finished eating, I gave the boy a piece of candy and asked him to offer her one as well.

This was a different offering: smaller, not a meal, and not a transaction. It was just a piece of candy from someone who had just shown that receiving does not require payment. On the second day, she accepted the candy from me. By the fourth day, she accepted the food at lunch.

When she was ready to speak, she told me about the past.

A childhood that had been, before all of it, genuinely happy, she had trusted completely, the way children do when the world has not yet given them a reason not to.

She said: I know I cannot get that back. I just wish it had never been taken.

That sentence is the clearest articulation I have ever heard of the difference I am trying to name. She did not say “I wish it had not changed”.

Change she could have lived with, but she said “taken”, because she understood, at a level below language, that what happened to her trust was not a natural conversion, it was a theft, which was carried out deliberately, by someone with the power and the intention to do it.

Natural loss requires us to grieve, and then to examine closely what remains. Grief is not optional; bypassing it creates individuals who have adapted so completely that they can no longer recognise the impact of their loss, which can be damaging in its own way. After experiencing grief, it’s important to reflect on a meaningful question:

What has transformed?

And what exists now that could not have existed before this loss created space for it?

Stolen loss asks something harder; it cannot convert on its own because the conversion was interrupted before it could complete. It requires something external, a witness, a patient presence, someone willing to eat the food first. To demonstrate, through repeated small acts, that safety still exists in the world even when it cannot yet be felt from inside.

The girl did not regain her original trust; she clearly stated that she knew she could not. Instead, she built something different, something that was deliberately constructed and consciously chosen, marked by a carefulness that her previous innocent openness lacked.

She is a woman now. I have seen her photographs, and she appears to be someone who knows exactly which spaces are worth her presence and which are not.

We often expend so much energy trying to avoid loss that we forget to consider the nature of the loss itself. Some losses are the price we pay for becoming painful, necessary, and ultimately generous in what they leave behind.

Others are debts we never agreed to carry, and the work of recovering from them is not about returning to what was taken but about building something new in the space where it was.

Which parts of you were shaped by natural loss, and which by the losses that were taken from you?

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