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

by Megan Devine

Acknowledgment is everything. You’re in pain. It can’t be made better.

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.

Even when it’s expected, death or loss still comes as a surprise. Everything is different now. The life you expected to unfold disappears: vaporized. The world splits open, and nothing makes sense.

This is not how you thought it would be. Time has stopped. Nothing feels real. Your mind cannot stop replaying the events, hoping for a different outcome. The ordinary, everyday world that others still inhabit feels coarse and cruel.

This isn’t a paper cut. It’s not a crisis of confidence. You didn’t need this thing to happen in order to know what’s important, to find your calling, or even to understand that you are, in fact, deeply loved.

Telling the truth about grief is the only way forward: your loss is exactly as bad as you think it is. And people, try as they might, really are responding to your loss as poorly as you think they are. You aren’t crazy. Something crazy has happened, and you’re responding as any sane person would.

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.

We don’t talk about the fragility of life: how everything can be normal one moment, and completely changed the next. We have no words, no language, no capacity to face this, together or as individuals. Because we don’t talk about it, when we most need love and support, there’s nothing to be found. What is available falls far short of what we need.

This book is not about fixing you, or fixing your grief. It’s not about making you “better” or getting you back to “normal.” This book is about how you live inside your loss. How you carry what cannot be fixed. How you survive.

People offer suggestions for how to get out of your grief faster. They tell you what they would do if they were in your position. They tell you about their own losses, as though every grief is exactly the same. As though knowing someone else has suffered makes anything any different.

Of course people want to make you feel better—it’s part of being human: We want to take away what hurts. We want to help. We want to be helped. We want things from each other we should be able to give. But instead of feeling held and comforted, many grieving people feel shamed, shunned, and dismissed. Instead of feeling effective and useful, those trying to help feel unwanted, frustrated, and unappreciated. No one gets what they want.

There may in fact be a spiritual solution to every problem, but grief is not a problem to be solved. It isn’t “wrong,” and it can’t be “fixed.” It isn’t an illness to be cured.

Most people approach grief as a problem to be solved. Your friends and family see you in pain, and they want to relieve your pain. Whether that aim is stated clearly or not, it’s the sole reason why words of comfort usually feel anything but comforting to you in your grief. Intentionally or not, by trying to solve your grief, they aren’t giving you the support you actually need.

One experience of loss does not translate into another. Grief is as individual as love. That someone has experienced a loss—even one similar to yours—does not mean they understand you.

We all want to talk about our pain. We all carry stories that need acknowledgment. But right now? Right now, when you are in pain, when your loss is primary and powerful? That is not the time for a two-way, give-and-take discussion about the losses we all sustain.

Friends and family want you to feel better. They want to take away your pain. What they don’t understand is that in trying to take your pain away, they’re actually dismissing and minimizing the extent of your grief. They aren’t seeing your reality for what it is. They don’t see you.

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.

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...

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. Statements like this say you were not good enough before. You somehow needed this.

But for those whose lives were full and deep before their loss? The researcher admits that these participants didn’t experience big surges in growth because there were no big surges to make. There’s no comfort in “becoming a better person” when you were already happy with the person you were.

Grief is not an enlightenment program for a select few. No one needs intense, life-changing loss to become who they are “meant” to be. The universe is not causal in that way: you need to become something, so life gives you this horrible experience in order to make it happen. On the contrary: life is call-and-response. Things happen, and we absorb and adapt. We respond to what we experience, and that is neither good nor bad. It simply is. The path forward is integration, not betterment.

When you choose to find meaning or growth inside your loss, that’s an act of personal sovereignty and self-knowledge. When someone else ascribes growth or meaning to your loss, it diminishes your power, gives subtle shaming or judgment to who you were before, and tells you that you needed this somehow. No wonder it feels so bad.

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

As a culture, our views on grief are almost entirely negative. Grief is seen as an aberration, a detour from “normal,” happy life. Our medical models call it a disorder. We believe that grief is a short-term response to a difficult situation, and as such, should be over and done within a few weeks.

The thing is, people think the whole point of grief is to get out of it as quickly as possible. As if grief were some strange thing, some bizarre, and incorrect, response to someone (or something) you love being torn from your life. Grief gets a narrow window to be expressed. After that, you are expected to return to normal, carrying with you the gifts you’ve learned from the experience. You’re supposed to become wiser, more compassionate, and truly understand what’s important. Staying sad means you’re not doing it right.

We think “happy” is the equivalent of “healthy.” As though happiness were the baseline, the norm to which all things settle, when we’re living as we should.

We have it so deeply engrained in us that any kind of hardship shouldn’t last more than a couple of months, at most. Anything more than that is considered malingering. As though the loss of someone you love were just a temporary inconvenience, something minor, and surely not something to stay upset over.

Her stages, whether applied to the dying or those left living, were meant to normalize and validate what someone might experience in the swirl of insanity that is loss and death and grief. They were meant to give comfort, not create a cage.

Death, and its aftermath, is such a painful and disorienting time. I understand why people—both the griever and those around them, whether personal or professional—want some kind of road map, a clearly delineated set of steps or stages that will guarantee a successful end to the pain of grief. But you can’t force an order on pain. You can’t make grief tidy or predictable.

To do grief well depends solely on individual experience. It means listening to your own reality. It means acknowledging pain and love and loss. It means allowing the truth of these things the space to exist without any artificial tethers or stages or requirements.

Social scientist Brené Brown argues that we live in “a Gilded Age of Failure,” where we fetishize recovery stories for their redemptive ending, glossing over the darkness and struggle that precedes it.

Grieving people are met with impatience precisely because they are failing the cultural storyline of overcoming adversity. If you don’t “transform,” if you don’t find something beautiful inside this, you’ve failed. And if you don’t do it quickly, following that narrative arc from incident to transformation within our collective attention span, you’re not living the right story.

As a culture, we don’t want to hear that there are things that can’t be fixed. As a culture, we don’t want to hear that there is some pain that never gets redeemed.

Some things we learn to live with, and that’s not the same as everything working out in the end. No matter how many rainbows and butterflies you stick into the narrative, some stories just don’t work out.

Loss, pain, and grief all existed in that world, and they were never redeemed. They were carried. Rowling’s world spoke to us, collectively, because we needed a story that sounded more like us.

If we’re going to change things, if we’re going to create new, valid, realistic, and useful storylines to live into, we have to start by refusing the happy ending. Or maybe, by redefining what a happy ending is. A happy ending inside grief like yours cannot be a simple “everything worked out for the best.” That ending isn’t even possible.

They didn’t know how to listen. But 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.

We don’t need new tools for how to get out of grief. What we need are the skills to withstand it, in ourselves and in others.

Pain is not always redeemed, in the end or otherwise. Being brave—being a hero—is not about overcoming what hurts or turning it into a gift. 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.

I have a theory (as yet scientifically unproven) that the more random or out-of-order the loss, the more judgment and correction the grieving person hears. It’s like we just can’t reconcile the fact that someone could be alive and well at breakfast and dead by lunch.

It’s terrifying to look at a person torn apart by their grief, knowing that could be us someday. Losses like this highlight the tenuous nature of life. How easily, how quickly life can change.

Seeing someone in pain touches off a reaction in us, and that reaction makes us very uncomfortable. Faced with this visceral knowledge that we, too, could be in a similar situation, we shut down our empathy centers. We deny our connection. We shift into judgment and blame. It’s an emotionally protective instinct.

How quick we are to demonize rather than empathize. How quick we are to move into debate, rather than hang out in the actual pain of the situation.

Pain and grief are never seen as healthy responses to loss. They’re far too threatening for that. We resist them in equal measure to our fear of being consumed by them. The problem with this—among many problems—is that it creates a societally acceptable blame structure in which any kind of hardship or pain is met with shame, judgment, and an admonishment to get back to “normal” quickly. If you can’t rise above it, you are, once again, doing something wrong.

As a way of deflecting responsibility away from the actual corporations that created the collapse, enforced positivity was a brilliant strategy: “What could be a better way of quelling dissent than to tell people who are suffering that it’s all their attitude,” writes Ehrenreich.5 What better way to silence pain than to blame those who feel it?

No matter how much our culture insists on it, spiritual and meditative practices are not meant to erase pain. That’s a symptom of our pain-avoidant culture, and not an accurate portrayal of the practices themselves.

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 way to get through the pain of being human is not to deny it, but to experience it. To let it exist. To let it be, without stopping it up or holding it back, or in our newer, more modern forms of resistance, by claiming it isn’t “evolved” to be in pain. That’s garbage. It’s elitist. By the same token, you don’t “allow” pain so that you can go back to a normative baseline of happiness. You allow pain because it’s real.

We have to be able to say what’s true without fear of being seen as weak, damaged, or somehow failing the cultural storyline. We need to make it just as normal to talk about our pain as it is to talk about our joy. There is no need to rush redemption.