'Bachelor' star, 36, gets candid about ‘grieving an unlived life’ after rare brain disorder diagnosis
Megan Marx reflected on the challenges of grief three years after receiving a rare brain disorder diagnosis.
The "Bachelor Australia" star was diagnosed in 2022 with spinocerebellar ataxia, a rare and incurable neurological disorder that affects coordination and mobility.
"There is a kind of grief that rarely earns a name," she wrote in an essay for Mamamia. "It is not the grief of death, nor even the grief that follows a diagnosis. It is the grief of the life we imagined we might live, and the slow recognition that it will not arrive."
The 36-year-old reality star reflected on her life as a person living with a chronic illness and explained the "distance between hope and capacity becomes a defining feature of existence" before noting that the distance needed to be mourned.
In addition to suffering from religious trauma, Marx admitted her life was "shaped less by aspiration than by survival. Recurring depression and cyclothymic disorder threaded through my adolescence and adulthood, sometimes treated and sometimes not."
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Her diagnosis "gave language to what had always been present: a body and mind operating under constant strain."
"It explained years of instability, fatigue and inconsistency that had been misread by others and by myself as personal failure," she wrote. "These forces did not merely interrupt my life; they structured it."
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Marx's time in front of the camera affected her in waves, both physically and mentally.
"Each cycle ended the same way: withdrawal, fallout, failure," Marx noted. "Regret became dense and immobilising. What appeared from the outside as inconsistency was, in fact, a nervous system oscillating between protection and overextension, between hiding and burning out."
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She wrote how regret becomes part of an identity while living with grief.
"Grieving an unlived life is not a refusal of reality. It is an act of honesty. Something was lost," she continued. "Pretending nothing was lost binds us to shame; naming it allows movement. It challenges the belief that worth is measured by productivity, consistency, or visibility. Survival, when understood honestly, is not failure; it is a form of adaptation.
"I carry an awareness of this grief, but I am careful not to let it contain me. I want a life that is workable and free in the ways that matter. That has required deliberate narrowing. In recognition of my neurological disease, and in protection against relapse, I have stripped my life back to what can be sustained."