It's OK That You're Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn't Understand

by Megan Devine

Distraction is a healthy coping strategy.

In early grief, a “happy place” is pretty well impossible to find. There is no place your loss does not touch. There is nothing that is not tied back to it.

tools that work outside grief aren’t always useful inside grief.

turning away from your pain when your pain is too big for the situation is a kindness. It’s a way to pay attention, to tend to yourself with love and respect.

Grief requires kindness. Self-kindness. For all you have had to live.

Inside your grief, you have to put yourself first. To survive, you have to become fierce about caring for yourself.

We often think of grief as primarily emotional, but grief is a full-body, full-mind experience.

losing someone close to us changes our biochemistry:

Respiration, heart rate, and nervous system responses are all partially regulated by close contact with familiar people and animals; these brain functions are all deeply affected when you’ve lost someone close.

In addition to physical effects, cognitive changes, memory loss, confusion, and shortened attention spans are all common in early grief. Some effects even last for years—and that’s perfectly normal.

in early grief. Everything we’ve been—both physically and emotionally—is in a state of flux.

Sleep as much as you can, when you can. It helps your body restore itself, keeping your physical body as strong, well, and healthy as it can be. It’s not avoidance, or denial: it’s restoration and respite.

I’ve heard from a lot of grieving people struggling with “mystery” pains and illnesses, all attributed to grief or stress.

Many people have noticed that it’s their body—their physical reactions and sensations—that alert them to an emotionally heavy date on the calendar.

The body remembers. The body knows.

There’s no “normal” appetite in grief. Some people eat under stress; some people, like me, lose all interest in food.

The thing is, tending the organism—the physical body—is one of the few tangible ways you really can change your experience of grief. Finding small ways to care for your physical body can reduce your suffering, even if it doesn’t change your pain.

you will most likely find that your brain just does not work. You may have been brilliant and organized before this loss, able to multitask, remember, execute. But grief changes all of that.

Grief does that. It rearranges your mind. It takes away skill sets you’ve had since childhood. It makes even the simplest things hard to follow. It makes once-familiar things feel arbitrary or confusing. It impacts your memory, your ability to communicate, your capacity for interaction.

This is another of grief’s physical side effects that does seem to consistently improve over time. As you live further from the event of your loss, your mind will make more space for memory. Order will more or less be restored (or re-created).

Please try not to judge your current accomplishments based on what you used to be able to do. You are not that person right now.

Mental confusion and a sort of brain-fog feeling are extremely common.

Grief strips life down to its irreducible essentials. In that visceral state, your distance from the “normal” world can feel insurmountable. There’s an uncomfortable truth here: you are not like other people. Not right now.

You aren’t crazy. You aren’t broken. Your brain is busy, and it will simply take a while to come back online.

For a lot of people, it’s a few years before their entire cognitive capacity comes back to any recognizable form.

Remember that this is a normal response to a stressful situation; it’s not a flaw in you. You’re not crazy. You’re grieving. Those are very different things.

Anxiety—whether it’s new to you, or you experienced it before your loss—is a huge issue in grief.

I’d spin off into imaginary negative fantasies instead of focusing on whatever was actually going on.

“Worrying about what has not happened is not useful. If something bad does happen, you will deal with it then. It is highly unlikely that anything awful will happen. If it does, you will deal.”

You rehearse what you would do if you were faced with unthinkable trauma again

You don’t trust your instincts anymore. Terrible things are possible. Constant vigilance can seem like the only route to take. Danger lurks everywhere. Loss is always waiting for you. You have to be prepared.

Anxiety is exhausting. It sucks. And it’s not even useful, no matter how much it screams that it’s real. Anxiety is patently ineffective at managing risk and predicting danger. Most

Each time we imagine multiple potential disasters, horrible dangers, all the ways the world can go wrong, we tell our nervous system that there is a current clear and present danger.

You can’t rely on old comforts of believing that your fears are unlikely to come true. You can’t lean on the statistically low risk of certain illnesses or accidents happening. Just because you saw your people half an hour ago does not mean they’re still OK now. When the ordinary safety of the world has already failed you, how can you ever feel safe here again?

Here’s the thing: no matter what your anxiety tells you, rehearsing disaster will not make you safe. Repeatedly checking in with people to be sure they’re still safe will never create a lasting sense of safety.

practice making your exhale longer than your inhale.

Reducing the frequency and overall amount of anxiety you experience has three parts: learning to trust yourself, replacing disaster scenarios with more positive images, and finding a neutral place—neither denying danger nor succumbing to rampant anxiety.

That’s the problem with anxiety: you never run out of potential disaster.

Instead of creating trouble out of nothing, you might tell yourself: Right now, as far as I know, everything is fine. If a challenge arises—of any kind—I trust myself to respond with skill. If there’s something I don’t know how to do, I trust that I’ll ask for help.

Your thoughts can influence how you respond to what is, but your thoughts do not create what is.

The only way I’ve found to live inside that reality is to tell myself that, currently, I’m not safe, and I’m not in danger either. Every moment is neutral.

It’s a space of alert calm: neither rehearsing disaster nor falling back into a denial of life’s risks.

Anxiety is using your imagination to create a future you do not want. So let’s not do that.

You cannot prevent loss. Your “safety” resides in your own heart, in how you care for yourself, in how you imagine the world.

Whatever you might create in your pain, out of your pain, no matter how beautiful or useful it might be, it will never erase your loss.

Death doesn’t end a relationship; it changes it.

The stories we create are a continuation of love.

Writer and artist Anders Nilsen’s books Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow and The End

Rosalie Lightning: A Graphic Memoir is

Michael Rosen’s The Sad Book, illustrated by Quentin Blake, doesn’