Avidya: The Blindness You Lived In

In Vedantic philosophy, avidya is not moral failing but fundamental ignorance—the veiling of true nature. Your former identity was necessarily built within avidya: you could not see beyond certain boundaries, could not access certain knowledge, lived within a particular constellation of what you didn't know about yourself. Grief for lost identity partly mourns the loss of that comfortable ignorance. What you didn't know couldn't trouble you; the limitations you didn't recognize felt like freedom. Mirabai's spiritual awakening brought knowledge that her queenly life could not contain—and this knowledge, once seen, could not be unseen. This concept reframes your transition as a movement from avidya to vidya (knowledge), from blindness to sight. The grief is real: ignorance was simpler. But it teaches compassion for your former self, who could only see what was available to see. You're not rejecting that self for being false, but honoring it as the necessary precondition for your becoming.