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

by Megan Devine LPC

Exposed to all that is lost, she sings with a stray girl who is also herself, her amulet. ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love. CARL SAGAN

You don’t need solutions. You don’t need to move on from your grief. You need someone to see your grief, to acknowledge it. You need someone to hold your hands while you stand there in blinking horror, staring at the hole that was your life.

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

There is nothing wrong with grief. It’s a natural extension of love. It’s a healthy and sane response to loss. That grief feels bad doesn’t make it bad; that you feel crazy doesn’t mean you are crazy.

Grief is part of love. Love for life, love for self, love for others. What you are living, painful as it is, is love. And love is really hard. Excruciating at times.

There are losses that rearrange the world. Deaths that change the way you see everything, grief that tears everything down. Pain that transports you to an entirely different universe, even while everyone else thinks nothing has really changed.

How random and fragile life can be.

There is not a reason for everything. Not every loss can be transformed into something useful. Things happen that do not have a silver lining.

This book is about how you live inside your loss. How you carry what cannot be fixed. How you survive.

In order to survive, to find that life that feels authentic and true to you, we have to start with telling the truth. This really is as bad as you think. Everything really is as wrong, and as bizarre, as you know it to be. When we start there, we can begin to talk about living with grief, living inside the love that remains.

Grief is visceral, not reasonable: the howling at the center of grief is raw and real. It is love in its most wild form.

To feel truly comforted by someone, you need to feel heard in your pain. You need the reality of your loss reflected back to you—not diminished, not diluted. It seems counterintuitive, but true comfort in grief is in acknowledging the pain, not in trying to make it go away.

Grief is not a problem to be solved; it’s an experience to be carried.

Despite what many “experts” believe, there are no stages of grief. Despite what the wider population believes, there are no stages of grief.

Being brave is about waking to face each day when you would rather just stop waking up. Being brave is staying present to your own heart when that heart is shattered into a million different pieces and can never be made right.

It’s all part of that cultural storyline that glorifies transformation, while staunchly avoiding the reality of pain in the world.

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.

The real cutting edge of growth and development is in hurting with each other. It’s in companionship, not correction. Acknowledgment—being seen and heard and witnessed inside the truth about one’s own life—is the only real medicine of grief.

As the poet and activist Joanna Macy writes, that your world is in pain is no reason to turn your back on it.

Recovery, as defined in the dictionary, means to restore oneself to a normal state, to regain what was lost, or to be compensated for what was taken.

The whole idea of recovery is just plain strange in this kind of grief.

That hole torn in the universe will not just close back up so that you can go back to normal. No matter what happens next in your life, it will never be adequate compensation.

And that makes it tricky. If there is no “healing” in terms of being as good as new, if we can’t “recover” any more than someone who has lost their legs can simply will them to grow back, how do we go on?

In order to live well with grief—in order to live alongside grief—I think we need new terms.

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.

There are some events that happen in life that cause people to cross a threshold that forever changes them, whether they seek out their transformation or not.

we are made of love and scars, of healing and grace, of patience.

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.

Samira Thomas continues, “From this landscape, I take the lesson that I need not be who I once was, that I may hold my scars and my joy simultaneously. I need not choose between bending or breaking but that, through patience, I may be transfigured.”

We’re such an opinion-giving culture; it can be hard to remember that each person is an expert in their own life.