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Okay, I lost someone I loved. Now what?
My partner left me. So what?
The one thing I had been working relentlessly toward didn’t pan out the way I wanted. Big deal!
I need to move on.
Something bad happened, happens to everyone.
Someone died? That’s life.
I have to move on.
I need to find the next thing I can control, manage, or fix so I can have some sense of control over this seemingly uncontrollable and unfathomable life.
I need to get back to a routine.
I need to do something so I can feel like I have some stable ground to stand on again.
I need to bury my feelings somewhere deep within me, so deep that perhaps they eventually become out of reach. And then I can go back to pretending that everything is normal, even when it feels completely otherwise.
And that’s how it is for so many of us.
When faced with a huge loss or disappointment, when life falls apart and we’re in the middle of a tsunami of feelings, our first instinct is often to reach for the next thing that makes us feel safe. Something we can control or predict. Something we can fix or just get back to because that’s largely what we’ve learnt to do.
We grow up watching people around us deal with difficult emotions by getting on with life. We see people go back to work, take care of the house, look after everyone else, distract themselves, keep busy, and just stop talking about what happened.
We hear things like, “You have to be strong.” “Life has to go on.” “Don’t think about it too much. “Keep yourself busy. ”Everything happens for a reason.” “At least…”
And eventually, we learn that perhaps this is what coping looks like.
You can feel, but not for too long. You can grieve but don’t make other people uncomfortable. You can fall apart, but preferably in private, and get back to normal as quickly as you possibly can.
Yes, eventually life has to go on and may go back to normal in some ways, but the problem is that we often try to do all of this while we’re still right in the middle of the tsunami, and when our survival brain kicks in, it isn’t always particularly good at telling us where we’re going.
Are we actually swimming toward safety or are we going deeper and deeper into the tsunami because moving somewhere feels better than staying where we are?
So we push ourselves. We force ourselves to move on, be normal, get back to work, meet people, find somebody else, make another plan, set another goal. Basically, anything so we don’t have to feel everything we’re already feeling or everything we know is waiting underneath because sometimes our own feelings are far more overwhelming than the event itself.
We aren’t only running from what happened. We are running from our experience of what happened and that experience isn’t made up of one emotion.
There is sadness, anger, disappointment, despair, helplessness, hopelessness, fear, insecurity, anxiety, guilt, longing, confusion, and sometimes even relief. All colliding at once and fighting for our attention.
That’s perhaps what makes grief so difficult to understand. Grief isn’t an emotion. It is an entire emotional landscape created by loss and a highly daunting terrain to navigate.
And loss isn’t always death.
We grieve people who are still alive. We grieve relationships, friendships, opportunities. We grieve dreams we had invested years in. We grieve versions of ourselves and the future we thought we were going to have. Sometimes we even grieve the life we realise we never had in the first place because grief is a severance of sorts.
A severance from a person we loved, a relationship we believed in, a dream we had nurtured, an identity we had built, a version of life we thought we were going to live.
And when that is severed, we don’t only lose the thing itself. We lose everything we had attached to it—the love, hope, dreams, identity, memories, plans, and sometimes, most painfully, the possible future that will now never exist in quite the way we had imagined it.
Grief doesn’t come with a warning label, an expiry date, and there’s certainly no manual. It doesn’t look the same for everybody. It doesn’t feel the same for everybody. It doesn’t follow the same timeline for everybody. Everyone has to figure out their own way through it. Perhaps that’s precisely why it’s so difficult to navigate.
And because of what we’ve been taught and what we’ve watched everyone around us do we often try to manage grief rather than experience it.
>> We keep ourselves busy. Work becomes a refuge. We fill every empty hour because an empty hour means there might finally be enough silence for everything we’ve been avoiding to catch up with us.
>> We try to replace what we’ve lost. The next relationship, the next goal, next project, next plan. Not necessarily because we’re ready for something new, but because the emptiness left behind by what ended feels unbearable.
>> We intellectualise it. We analyse what happened endlessly. We replay conversations. Look for explanations. Try to understand why someone did what they did or why life unfolded the way it did. We can explain our grief beautifully without ever really allowing ourselves to feel it.
>> We numb ourselves through food, alcohol, scrolling, shopping, sex, work, sleep, socialising. Basically anything that gives us a few hours away from our own internal experience.
>> We force ourselves back to “normal.” We return to routines before we’re ready. We expect ourselves to function exactly as we did before. And when we can’t, we start wondering what is wrong with us.
>> We rush ourselves to move on. Why am I still thinking about this? Why am I still crying? Why does this still hurt? Shouldn’t I be over it by now?
>> We turn grief into another task we think we’re failing at.
But perhaps the question isn’t always “How do I get back to who I was?” because you can’t. Something has happened. Something has ended. Something you believed in has broken. Something you loved is no longer available to you in the way it once was and no amount of pretending otherwise can make you exactly the person you were before it happened.
Navigating grief isn’t about going backwards, no matter how much your heart aches. Grief is asking you to learn how to live forward, carry everything that’s broken with you and make something of it.
And that requires something different from us:
Grief needs to be felt, not fixed. There are things in life that can be solved. Grief isn’t one of them. You cannot productivity-hack your way out of it. You cannot think your way out of every feeling or create the perfect routine that guarantees you will never be hit by another wave. Sometimes you’ll be absolutely fine and then a song plays, a photograph appears, you pass a familiar place, someone says something, a date comes around, or you simply wake up one morning and it hurts again. That doesn’t mean you’ve gone backwards. It means you’re grieving.
Healing is not always evidence that something no longer affects us. Sometimes healing is discovering that we can feel something deeply without it completely swallowing us. Grief needs patience and then, almost cruelly, it tests that patience too. It needs us to stop measuring ourselves against an imaginary timeline of when we should be “better.” There may be days when you feel like yourself again and then there may be days when you don’t recognise yourself at all. There may be days when you laugh and wonder whether you’re finally okay, followed by a day when everything comes crashing back. None of that means you’re doing grief incorrectly. It just means you’re human.
Grief needs compassion and not the voice that says, Come on, enough now, why aren’t you over this yet? or the one that compares your loss with somebody else’s and decides you have no right to feel what you’re feeling. Grief needs the voice that can say, “Of course this hurts. It mattered to me. I wanted this. I thought my life was going to look different. And losing it hurts…like hell and I don’t know what to do with it”.
Grief needs rest. Grief is exhausting not just emotionally, but physically. Your mind is processing an entirely different reality while your body is trying to keep you functioning inside it. Sometimes grief asks you to face the immense exhaustion your body and spirit have been carrying, and perhaps you don’t need to immediately convert that exhaustion into productivity. Sometimes you simply need to be tired and let the world take a hike!
Grief needs to be witnessed. Perhaps this is one of the things we need most and talk about least. Sometimes, all we need is one person. One person who can see what we’re going through without immediately trying to make it better. Someone who can understand, who can hold space, who doesn’t rush us toward acceptance, tell us to look at the bright side, or remind us that everything happens for a reason. Someone who can simply sit beside us and acknowledge, This hurts. This mattered to you. I can see what you’ve lost, because most of the times grief doesn’t need advice. It needs company, and unfortunately, we don’t always have someone who can do that for us.
Sometimes, the people around us don’t understand, they’re uncomfortable with our pain, or they want us to move on because they don’t know what to do with our grief. And sometimes, the person who has to witness our grief is us. We have to learn how to sit beside ourselves without immediately trying to make ourselves feel better. We need to acknowledge what happened, honour what mattered, admit what we wanted, and grieve the future we had imagined. Perhaps self-compassion in grief begins there, not with making ourselves feel better, but with allowing ourselves to be seen, even by ourselves.
And grief needs us to accept that we may have to rebuild differently. A major loss doesn’t always affect one part of our life. Sometimes it shines a light on everything else. It exposes the cracks in our relationships, our identities, our coping mechanisms, our beliefs, and even the lives we had constructed for ourselves. Sometimes grief shows us that everything around us is broken or perhaps some of it always was, and now we’re finally forced to confront it and suddenly the methods we once used to hold everything together don’t work anymore because everything is different now. We cannot always use the same methods to rebuild a life that has fundamentally changed.
We have to learn different ways of putting ourselves together, not necessarily better or stronger, just differently. And perhaps this is where grief begins to change us. It can bring out the worst in us. It can make us angry, bitter, afraid, withdrawn, needy, restless, desperate for certainty. It can bring us face-to-face with parts of ourselves we would much rather not see. But if we’re willing to stay with the process, grief can also introduce us to parts of ourselves we had forgotten, like the strength we didn’t know we had, the dreams we had lost touch with, people who truly show up, boundaries we should have drawn years ago, the things that suddenly don’t matter anymore and the things that matter more than ever.
Sometimes when everything familiar falls apart, we finally get to see what remains.
No, we don’t need to glorify pain to recognise that it can change us. Not every tragedy happens “for a reason” and not every loss needs to become a lesson. And we certainly don’t need to be grateful for what broke our hearts. But when something has already happened, perhaps we get to decide what we do with what remains. Pain can simply be pain, and eventually, it may also become information, wisdom, compassion, clarity, a different way of living. Perhaps even an awakening—not because grief itself is somehow sacred, but because being stripped of what we thought we could rely on can force us to look at life differently.
But only if we’re willing to walk through the pain rather than spend our lives trying to bypass it.
And perhaps what we build by doing that is capacity—not the capacity to stop feeling or become hardened or unaffected by loss. But the capacity to hold more of life, to discover that heartbreak can exist alongside hope. To know that sadness can coexist with laughter and that we can miss what was and still become curious about what might be. That something can break us open without destroying our ability to live because life, sure as hell, isn’t going to stop coming.
There will be love and loss, beginnings and endings, plans that work and plans that don’t, people who stay and people who leave, versions of ourselves we will outgrow and futures we will have to imagine all over again.
We cannot prepare ourselves for every loss. But perhaps every time we allow ourselves to genuinely move through grief rather than bypass it, we build a little more capacity to meet life as it comes.
Grief doesn’t make life easier. It makes it more difficult and messier. Sometimes, it makes it almost unlivable, but at some level it also makes us more capable of holding life.
But for that we need to surrender to this ocean of grief. To let the waves wash over us whenever they want, without fighting or running away from them. We need to let time pass, let wounds heal, and slowly, allow life to start flowing through us.
“Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.” ~ C.S. Lewis
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