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

by Megan Devine

It was easier to pretend everything was fine than to continually defend and explain our grief to those who couldn’t understand.

No one can win: grieving people feel misunderstood, and friends and family feel helpless and stupid in the face of grief.

We see it as something to overcome, something to fix, rather than something to tend or support. Even our clinicians are trained to see grief as a disorder rather than a natural response to deep loss.

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.

Platitudes and cheerleading solve nothing. In fact, this kind of support only makes you feel like no one in the world understands.

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.

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.

And that’s the truth about grief: loss gets integrated, not overcome.

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

Intentionally or not, by trying to solve your grief, they aren’t giving you the support you actually need.

Though they often don’t mean to, people make grief feel much worse when they try to pretty it up, gloss over it, or make it go away.

When you start talking about loss, it’s like there’s suddenly this permission, and we think, Oh, thank goodness, we’re talking about grief now. Let me tell you about the losses I’ve suffered!

Here’s the thing: every loss is valid. And every loss is not the same.

When someone tries to alleviate your pain by sharing their own story of suffering, know that they are attempting to connect and relate. And know that there is a reason it feels so crappy: they aren’t actually connecting. They’re unintentionally turning the focus away from you and onto their own stories of pain. Your reality is erased, which is exactly the opposite of what they’d hoped to do. It then sets up this “my grief is worse than yours” dichotomy that leaves everyone feeling unheard and dismissed. Comparison doesn’t work for anyone.

Saying something like “He wouldn’t want you to be sad” or “At least you had her for as long as you did” might seem like a comfort. The problem is, there’s an implied second half of the sentence in all those familiar lines. That second half of the sentence unintentionally dismisses or diminishes your pain; it erases what is true now in favor of some alternate experience. That ghost-sentence tells you it’s not OK to feel how you feel.

Words of comfort that try to erase pain are not a comfort. When you try to take someone’s pain away from them, you don’t make it better. You just tell them it’s not OK to talk about their pain.

100000%

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.

As though loss and hardship were the only ways to grow as a human being. As though pain were the only doorway to a better, deeper life, the only way to be truly compassionate and kind.

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

comparing one way of living with loss with another, as though it were a pass-fail endeavor? That is never going to help.

I spend all day listening to the pain grieving people carry on top of their actual grief. I hear, over and over again, how painful it is to be judged, dismissed, and misunderstood.

There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors.

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.

We’ve got this idea that there are only two options in grief: you’re either going to be stuck in your pain, doomed to spend the rest of your life rocking in a corner in your basement wearing sackcloth, or you’re going to triumph over grief, be transformed, and come back even better than you were before. Just two options. On, off. Eternally broken or completely healed. It doesn’t seem to matter that nothing else in life is like that.

Grief no more needs a solution than love needs a solution. We cannot “triumph” over death, or loss, or grief. They are immovable elements of being alive. If we continue to come at them as though they are problems to be solved, we’ll never get solace or comfort in our deepest pain.

Continuing to show up, continuing to look for support inside your pain, when all the world tries to tell you it’s a problem, is an act of fierce self-love and tenacity. Grief is not a sign that you’re unwell or unevolved. It’s a sign that love has been part of your life, and that you want love to continue, even here.

Repetition of the story is a safety mechanism, one way the creative mind tries to reorder the world when it’s been dissolved. We tell the story again and again because the story needs to be told—we’re looking for some way this makes sense, even if it never can.

or you realize, halfway through, that you can never crack jokes with your sister about this movie,

When you get to the “emergency contact” part of a form, and realize you can no longer put down the name of the person who has held that spot for years.

When someone you love dies, you don’t just lose them in the present or in the past. You lose the future you should have had, and might have had, with them. They are missing from all the life that was to be. Seeing other people get married, have kids, travel—all the things you expected out of life with your person—gone.

Whatever the relationship, seeing evidence of those same relationships going on in the rest of the world is brutal, and unfair, and impossible to withstand.

No wonder grief is so exhausting. It’s not just the intense actual pain of loss. It’s the sheer number of tiny things that need to be avoided, endured, planned for. Impossible to tell from the outside, but those of us in grief absolutely understand. We all have our stories of exhaustion, avoidance, and the need to just not talk.

if it makes you feel sick, now is not the time. Use the vomit metric for any decisions you have to make and for the ones you feel like you’re supposed to make.

In fact, memorials and anniversary events are often a hot spot: tempers flare, old issues resurface, social skills erode. Whatever you choose to do, or not do, do your best to pace yourself. Keep checking in with your heart about what you might need in any given moment.

I think all we can do, all any of us can do, is continue to be open about pain, death, grief, and love in age-appropriate ways. We can let our kids know that they can ask us anything. We can let them see our own grief in a way that says, “This hurts, and it’s OK to feel it.” We can ask, knowing that they may not be willing—or able—to voice what they feel.

In all interpersonal challenges—death related or otherwise—my usual advice is to behave in such a way that you can look back on the experience and feel you used good, healthy skills of negotiation, compassion, and self-advocacy. The way you behave under this kind of stress is really the only thing under your control.

Thanks so much for your kind words. You’ve really relieved my suffering, with all this trying to talk me out of it. The people I love, the ones I will go to again and again, are the ones who do not in any way try to “solve” this for me, or fix it, or fix me. They do not make any attempt to cheer me up, or shame me into feeling thankful that I had as much love as I did, and so should be happy with that. They do not tell me things will be better “later,” and that I have so much to live for. They do not remind me I am part of the cycle of life. As though that matters, all that pandering, condescending crap.

pain gets supported; suffering gets adjusted.

While we might think that grief erupts without warning, there are always early warning signs. Gathering data helps you recognize those signs.

If you think of your stability, your capacity to be present to this grief, as a bank account, every interaction is a withdrawal. Every stressor is a withdrawal. Recognizing the signs that your account is getting low is one big way of preventing—and soothing—both meltdowns and grief overwhelm.

there is no reason to increase your suffering with an unrelenting series of cruel and judgmental thoughts. Imaginary unwinnable battles are not a kindness.

Feeling consumed by rage and a sense of injustice? Your data might show that your justifiable anger gets much larger when you’ve spent time with “friends” who judge or dismiss your grief.

Sometimes you do not care one bit whether you live or die. Not because you’re actively suicidal, but because you simply do not care.

In trauma work, we never dive into discussion of the actual traumatic events until the person has a solid framework of support and a way to manage the feelings that come up.