The hardest part of healing isn’t the work. It’s grieving the version of yourself who survived without it.

When astronaut Jerry Linenger returned from 132 days aboard Mir in 1997, having survived a fire, a near-collision, and the slow psychological erosion of confinement, he wrote that the hardest part of coming home wasn’t the physical readaptation. It was grieving the version of himself who had figured out how to survive up there. The hypervigilant, emotionally compressed, perpetually-scanning-for-the-next-failure self. The one who had kept him alive. The one Earth no longer needed.

That paradox...