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

by Megan Devine

Like many grieving people, we stopped talking about our pain to friends and family. It was easier to pretend everything was fine than to continually defend and explain our grief to those who couldn’t understand.

Because the truth is, in one way or another, loving each other means losing each other. Being alive in such a fleeting, tenuous world is hard. Our hearts get broken in ways that can’t be fixed. There is pain that becomes an immovable part of our lives. We need to know how to endure that, how to care for ourselves inside that, how to care for one another. We need to know how to live here, where life as we know it can change, forever, at any time.

We assume that if something is uncomfortable, it means something is wrong. People conclude that grief is “bad” because it hurts.

That all grief is valid does not mean that all grief is the same.

this is what happens when we only tell stories of how pain can be redeemed: we’re left with no stories that tell us how to live in it. We have no stories of how to bear witness. We don’t talk about pain that can’t be fixed. We’re not allowed to talk about it.

What starts as limbic system-based connection reverts to a brain stem survival instinct, an us-or-them response, that puts those in pain on the wrong side of the line, and us, always on the right. We distance ourselves from pain rather than feel annihilated by it.

No one here wants to acknowledge that there might just be chaos and that some things happen because they can,

Spiritual practices in any tradition, including mindfulness in its many forms, are meant to help you live what is yours to live, not make you rise above it. These tools are meant to help you feel companioned inside your grief. They’re meant to give you a tiny bit of breathing room inside what is wholly unbearable. That’s not at all the same thing as making your pain go away.

Your emotional resilience and intelligence has to be quite secure to be able to hold your gaze on the reality of loss.

We need to make it just as normal to talk about our pain as it is to talk about our joy.

Real safety is in entering each other’s pain, recognizing ourselves inside it.

Honestly, if we just changed our orientation to grief as a problem to be solved and instead see it as a mystery to be honored, a lot of our language of support could stay the same.

Repetition of the story is a safety mechanism, one way the creative mind tries to reorder the world when it’s been dissolved.

Nothing brings out the crazy in a family quite like death.

Pain is a normal and healthy response to loss. The way to survive grief is by allowing pain to exist, not in trying to cover it up or rush through it.

The only way to know what is likely to reduce your suffering is by becoming curious about it. Mapping the territory.

Sometimes, with the small amount of energy you have, the only thing you can do is heave yourself in the direction of wellness. Heave yourself in the direction of gentleness-to-self.

There isn’t anything you need to do with your pain. Nothing you need to do about your pain. It simply is. Give it your attention, your care. Find ways to let it stretch out, let it exist. Tend to yourself inside it. That’s so different from trying to get yourself out of it.

There’s so much to say about grief, and only so much capacity to take it all in.

a cascade of images and hormones to help you find safety. Because you’ve experienced the world as drastically unsafe at one point, when one fear gets resolved, your mind comes up with another fear, in a perpetual bid for safety: it’s a natural survival tool on tilt.

Self-trust can feel impossible when loss has shown up in your life.

Creating something good out of loss is not a trade, and it’s not a cure.

Creative practices can also help you deepen your connection with that which is lost. Death doesn’t end a relationship; it changes it. Writing, painting, and other creative processes allow the conversation that began in life Before to continue in life After. The stories we create are a continuation of love.

“That first year, my grief-year, I could hardly believe what had happened. I carried my story outside of me, like a heavy, sharp, awkward object. It was impossible and ungainly, always scratching at my hands or dropping with an ugly thud on my big toe. I lugged that tale through the heat of summer, the colors of autumn, the snows of winter, and the rebirth of spring before I made enough space for it inside of myself. It’s not a puzzle, you know. No amount of shoving can make that huge pointy weight fit into a neat little empty space, and no amount of turning could fit back together the pieces of my shattered heart. I had to learn to see it as a sculpting project, working the clay of my loss and the clay of myself until I could build something new from it, then, standing back, accept the work-in-progress as me.

You will not “move on.” You will not return to “who you used to be.” How could you? To refuse to be changed by something as powerful as this would be the epitome of arrogance.

We are changed by our new realities. We exist at the edge of becoming. We don’t recover. We don’t move on. We don’t return to normal. That is an impossible request.

There is no going back. There is no moving on. There is only moving with: an integration of all that has come before, and all you have been asked to live.

Given what cannot be restored, what cannot be made right, how do we live here?

Grief changes you. Who you become remains to be seen. You do not need to leave your grief behind in order to live a newly beautiful life. It’s part of you. Our aim is integration, not obliteration.

Remember that grief itself is not a problem, and as such, cannot be fixed. Grief is a natural process; it has an intelligence all its

Acknowledgment of the reality of pain is usually a far better response than trying to fix it. Bearing witness is what is most called for.

Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.