The Grief of Outgrowing Yourself
A crowd of people with their hands raised in the air, facing a stage lit in red and purple. Above the crowd, the word “COMMUNITY” glows in large, white letters. The scene evokes the energy of a live music event or festival, with a sense of collective movement and connection.
I grew up in a musical home. There was always music playing. My dad was a bass player and singer, and sound was constant. In the walls, in the floor, in the rythm of the day. Vinyl on the stereo, instruments coming alive in the living room, and later, me—at clubs, shows, festivals, following the thread of rhythm across state lines and seasons of my life.
Music wasn’t just something I liked. It was something I belonged to.
Jam bands, bluegrass, funk, afrobeat. I used to spend whole summers going to shows and festivals, working at venues, steeping in a sense of place and people that pulsed in time with the music. Colorado was especially rich for that, Fort Collins, Boulder, Denver. It felt like a living organism, and I was inside it. I found friends, movement, belonging. I found myself there.
But something started to shift early 2020. Slowly, at first I barely noticed. A show here or there that didn’t land. A night spent in the lounge instead of dancing, thinking it was just the band, or the mood, or the moment. I told myself it was just the Dead, just that venue, just a weird night. But the unraveling had already begun.
And then the world shut down. Shows stopped. Venues went quiet. And for a while, I didn’t have to notice how much had already begun to fall away. It was almost a relief, like the pause gave me cover. Like the disconnect wasn’t mine, just circumstantial. But when the doors opened again, I realized it wasn’t the world I’d grown distant from. It was the music. The scene. The shape I used to be.
When Fela died at the end of 2021, something cracked open that I couldn’t seal back up. Grief rearranged my insides. The music that once lit me up began to feel…off. It didn’t register in my system. Like my body had rewired itself and the old sounds no longer fit the current circuitry.
And then, in the spring of 2022, techno found me. Deep, underground, pulsing techno—something in it matched where I was, how I’d changed. I stopped trying to force myself into the old rhythm and let this new one take hold. It felt like my frequency had shifted, subtly but unmistakably. The old containers began to crack.
And still, three years later, I keep trying to go back. I live in Portland now, a place I used to dream about because so many of my favorite bands came through. And they still do. I go to the shows. I want to love them. I want to feel like I belong again. But I leave feeling flat, hollow, confused. Like walking through the ruins of a home that no longer recognizes me.
I keep trying to grieve this loss like it’s just a phase, like maybe the right show will bring it all back. But the truth is sinking in: this isn’t temporary. This is transformation. And transformation doesn’t always ask permission.
People talk a lot about letting go of the things that aren’t us. Stripping away false identities, ego layers, masks we wore to survive. But what no one really prepares you for is losing the parts that were you. The ones that nourished you. The ones that felt like home.
I didn’t expect to lose live music. Or the clothes I wore when I danced at festivals. Or the version of me that came alive under stage lights and open skies, barefoot in dirt and glitter, moving with a thousand bodies at once. I didn’t expect to stand in front of a closet full of clothes and feel like I was sharing space with a ghost.
But here I am. Not just letting go of what never fit, but of what once did.
And what I’m learning is this: when we truly change form, we don’t get to choose what goes. We don’t get to decide what stays. We don’t get to bargain with the fire.
Sometimes, becoming who you are means watching something beloved slip from your hands. Because who you are now lives in a different form, and that belonging belonged to the version before. And when the shape changes, the vessel has to change too. You can’t pour a new frequency into an old form and expect it to hold.
Portland was supposed to be the place where I’d come alive again. For years, I daydreamed about living here, about being close enough to hear good music anytime I wanted, about walking into venues instead of driving two hours each way, about saying yes to all the shows I used to miss.
And now I’m here. The bands I once loved are still coming through. I keep buying tickets. I keep going out. I keep hoping the music will meet me where I am now. And I keep leaving feeling…nothing.
No pulse. No spark. No desire to dance. Just that hollow, familiar ache of trying to return to a version of myself that no longer exists.
There’s a particular kind of loneliness that comes with changing shape. Not just losing the music, but losing the mirror. The nod across the dance floor. The friends who knew how to track your movement through a set. The community that once felt like kin. And when you change frequency, sometimes those people can't hear you anymore. Not because they don’t love you, but because you're no longer vibrating in the same field.
And it’s not just the music. It’s the way I used to belong. The shared language of movement and presence. The friends I’d find barefoot by the speakers. The sense that we all knew how to move together. I keep looking for that here. And maybe it’s here for someone else. But it’s not here for me.
People might say, “Well, go find your new scene. Go find your people.” But the truth is, the thing I long for doesn’t quite exist here. There’s one underground club in Portland that carries the frequency—Process. It’s gritty and raw and dark in all the right ways. The sound is incredible. The space is embodied. But it’s only one place. One pocket. And it doesn’t always bring in the music that lights me up.
After Berlin, that feels especially sharp. That expereicne ruined me in the best way. In Berlin, the sound didn’t just enter my ears. It moved through my bones. Everything was tuned. The room, the bass, the bodies. It was coherent in a way I hadn’t realized I was starving for.
Once you’ve felt what’s possible—when the music, the space, the people, the pulse all converge—it’s hard to settle for less. It’s hard to pretend a night at a bar with poor sound and people talking on the dance floor is going to feed your soul.
And so I’m in this strange liminal place. Too changed to go back. Not yet fully landed in what’s next. I don’t belong to the old world. But I haven’t found the new one either. And sometimes, I wonder if there is a new one. What if this is it? What if the arrival I keep waiting for never comes? What if this liminal space—the ache, the floating, the absence of ground—isn’t a passage, but a place of its own?
I don’t want that to be true. But I’ve learned not to rush to meaning. So I stay here. Listening. Letting the not-knowing shape me, too.
And here’s the thing that keeps echoing in me lately: When you’re truly changing form, you don’t get to negotiate. You don’t get to cling to the parts that feel good. You don’t get to say, “Okay, I’ll let go of this, but I’m keeping that.”
Transformation doesn’t ask what you’re willing to lose. it simply begins. And in the process, it may take what once fed you, what shaped your rhythm, what made you feel most like yourself. Because some parts only live inside certain versions of you. When the form changes, they stay behind.
I never thought I’d be the person who doesn’t feel anything at a funk show. Or I’d grow out of the very scene that made me feel most alive.
But here I am. Standing in front of my closet, looking at festival gear that use to feel like home on my body. Bright colors, whimsical textures, the kind of outfits you’d see at Burning Man or a 3 night Panic run at Red Rocks. And when I try them on now, they feel like a mismatch. Like I’m borrowing someone else’s life.
The version standing here moves differently. Darker tones. Sharper edges. A presence pulled in, concentrated. No shimmer. I smolder now.
This isn’t about aesthetic, it’s about shape. About frequency. About how our insides rearrange themselves in ways we can’t always explain. About how when your signal changes, the places that used to resonate start to feel hollow. What once felt like home now feels like static.
And that brings me back to this question I’ve been sitting with: Do we get to choose the shape we take?
I used to think so. I used to think becoming was about agency. About deciding who you wanted to be and claiming it.
But lately, it feels more like something deeper is doing the shaping. Something older and cellular that lives in the body, not the mind.
And when you listen to that, to the language of sensation and image and ache, you don’t always end up where you thought you were going.
Sometimes you end up alone in a venue, realizing the music you once loved doesn’t move you anymore. Sometimes you outgrow the places that once felt like home. Sometimes you become unrecognizable, even to yourself.
And maybe that’s the cost of becoming real.
I don’t have a conclusion for this.
I’m still in it. Still shedding, still listening. Still noticing how much doesn’t fit anymore, and wondering what’s on its way in.
I don’t have clear answers. But what I do have are questions. And I’m learning that when I ask them from the body, from the ache, from the place where something just changed shape—even if I don’t know what it’s becoming yet—something always answers back. Sometimes through a feeling. Sometimes through an image. Sometimes through what’s no longer there.
So I’m staying in conversation and watching what rises.
And if you’re here too, somewhere between what used to fit and what hasn’t fully formed, I’ll leave you with this:
What shape is calling you now?
What might change if you let it come all the way through?
And are you willing to let the old containers break, just to see what could hold you now?
In the mess,
Alexandra Winteraven 🖤
