Finally found a word that describes the experience of losing the Nashville I grew up in:

Solastalgia is not nostalgia; nostalgia is the homesickness you feel when you are away from home. Solastalgia is the homesickness you feel when you are still at home. It's the pain, grief, or anxiety caused by the negative transformation of your familiar surroundings. It's the feeling of loss when the forest you grew up playing in is replaced by a shopping mall. It's the quiet dread of seeing your local river dry up year after year. It's the unease of realizing the seasons don't feel the same as they did when you were a child. It's the specific melancholy of losing a home that you haven't even left.

It gives a name to a deeply personal and increasingly common form of modern grief. Many people feel this profound sense of loss but struggle to articulate it, sometimes dismissing it as simple sadness or anger. Understanding Solastalgia validates this feeling as a legitimate response to environmental change. It's a shared experience of our time, and knowing the word for it can be the first step toward processing it, both personally and collectively. It's the language for a wound many of us carry without knowing its name.