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

by Megan Devine

Real safety is in entering each other’s pain, recognizing ourselves inside it. As one of my oldest teachers used to say, poignancy is kinship. It’s evidence of connection. That we hurt for each other shows our relatedness. Our limbic systems, our hearts, and our bodies are made for this; we long for that connection.

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.

There’s a whole middle ground between those two extremes (as there is for everything else in life), but we don’t know how to talk about it. We don’t know how to talk about grief if we step outside that pervasive cultural model of entirely healed or irrevocably broken.

The new model of grief is not in cleaning it up and making it go away; it’s in finding new and beautiful ways to inhabit what hurts. It’s in finding the depth of love necessary to witness each other’s pain without rushing in to clean it up.

We can never change the reality of pain. But we can reduce so much suffering when we allow each other to speak what is true, without putting a gag order on our hearts.

What you’re living can’t be fixed. It can’t be made better. There are no solutions.

Humans are storytelling creatures: it’s why we have cultural mythologies, creation stories, and movies. Telling the story of this loss over and over—it’s like we’re looking for an alternate ending. A loophole. Some way the outcome might have changed. Could still change. Maybe we missed something. If we can only get the story right, none of this would be happening. It doesn’t matter that that’s not “logical.” Logic means nothing.

How many times have people encouraged you to take your mind off this for a while, or they’ve avoided speaking your person’s name so they don’t “remind” you of what you’ve lost? As if you could forget, even for a moment.

everyday life is full of reminders and grief land mines that the non-grieving wouldn’t even think of.

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.

That’s yet another thing people outside grief wouldn’t normally think about: how, especially if your loss was out of order or unusual, it becomes a topic up for public discussion. Anytime you are out in public, people feel the need to come close, to ask, to check on you. It doesn’t often matter whether you are friends with the person or not. In fact, the more distant the relationship, the more probing you might receive while hovering over the produce bin.

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.

You will do what you need to do when you need to do it. Not a moment before. It will never feel good. But 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.

One of the best things someone said to me as I approached Matt’s one-year date was, “You always have the right to leave, even if you just got there, even if you planned the whole thing. No one else has to live this like you do. Leave whenever you need.” Just having that permission to leave made it easier to stay. No matter what you’ve planned, you can change your mind at any time. It’s also OK to not plan anything, instead waiting to check in with yourself when that special date comes. Often, the lead-up to a big date is harder than the date itself. Maybe you want to do something, maybe not.

Grief changes your friendships. For many, many people, it ends them. We’ll talk more about this in part 3, but for now, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how common, and how painful, this aspect of grief can be. Your loss intersects with often hidden or especially painful heartbreak in the people around you. Your pain bumps up against their pain. We may not call it that directly, but that’s often what’s happening when people behave poorly or fail to understand the immensity of your loss. And even when your friends want to support you, we don’t often have the skills—no matter how skilled we truly are—to witness and withstand another’s pain. Feeling helpless in the face of loss makes people do strange things.

All emotion is a response to something. Anger is a response to a sense of injustice. Of course you’re angry: whatever has happened to you is unjust.

Anger, allowed expression, is simply energy. It’s a response. Allowed expression, it becomes a fierce protective love—for yourself, for the one you’ve lost, and in some cases, gives you the energy to face what is yours to face. Shown respect and given room, anger tells a story of love and connection and longing for what is lost. There is nothing wrong with that.

Living inside grief, you know there is nothing to be fixed: this can’t be made right.

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.

Survival in early grief has a very small circumference. It’s not an ordinary time, and ordinary rules do not apply. In grief, especially early grief, you have little energy to use any “tools” whatsoever. And tools used in the service of making things better often feel more offensive than helpful.

Pain that is not allowed to be spoken or expressed turns in on itself, and creates more problems.

You can’t heal someone’s pain by trying to take it away from them. You can’t gloss over pain as though it were in the way of some “better” life. That grief is painful doesn’t make it wrong. 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.

Suffering comes with being told to not feel what you feel. Suffering comes with being told there is something wrong with what you feel. Suffering comes with all the crap that gets loaded on us by friends and colleagues and random strangers who, with the best of intentions, correct, judge, or give advice on how we need to grieve better. Suffering also comes when we don’t eat, don’t get enough sleep, spend too much time with toxic people, or pretend we’re not in as much pain as we’re in. Suffering comes when we rehash the events that led up to this death or this loss, punishing ourselves for not preventing it, not knowing more, not doing more. Suffering brings with it anxiety, and fear, and isolation. If we want to make this better for you, your suffering is where we need to look for change.

The broad answer is simple: pain gets supported; suffering gets adjusted. There is no one way to do either of these things. Your grief is as individual as your love. Your way through this will be made by you, in ways that are unique to your mind, your heart, your life.

It helps if you think of it not as something you can do correctly or incorrectly, but instead as an ongoing experiment. No matter how many times pain or grief has entered your life, this time is the first time. This grief is unlike any other. Each new experience gets to unfold—and be tended—in the ways that best suit what hurts.

Others have come before you, and others will come after, but no one carries grief—or love—in the same way you do. Grief is as individual as love. There’s nothing to do but experiment. It’s all a work in progress.

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.

Especially in very early grief, nothing is going to feel amazing. The weight of immoveable pain is simply too much. However, there might be moments where you feel steadier, less anxious, or are able to be gentler with yourself. Remember that we’re aiming to reduce suffering and find ways to tend to pain. If you find anything that feels less bad (in early grief) or, eventually, even a little bit good (whenever that happens), pay attention to that.

Remember, suffering is arbitrary. Mapping those subtle distinctions of what helps and what doesn’t is mapping your own suffering: It lets you know what can be changed or avoided. It lets you know where you do have some control in your grief.

In times of stress, your mind can get really ravenous and start eating itself. I know mine does. Insightful, self-reflective people tend to be far harder on themselves than other folks.

You can choose to spend more time doing things that have even the slightest chance of inducing more calm or peace in you, and see how that goes.

The best list in the world isn’t going to actually fix anything. I know. Remember that this is an experiment. Creating a list of things that help and things that make this worse gives you a compass. It gives you a tangible point of orientation when the reality of life and loss gets too big for one person to contain. It won’t fix anything. And it might help, if even just a little. What we’re trying for here, what I hope for you, is that you can find some peace in this for yourself, in this moment. That your suffering can be reduced. That you can tend to your pain, come to yourself with kindness. That you can hold your gaze on what is broken, without falling into the abyss of suffering that always makes things worse.

There are times you feel calmer and times you feel whipped around like a tetherball. One is not more right or more “emotionally evolved” than the other. One just feels better, and the other feels like crap. Sometimes you choose the crap because you don’t have it in you to care for yourself. Totally valid. Do what you can.

Feeling like you’d rather not wake up in the morning is normal in grief, and it doesn’t mean you’re suicidal. Not wanting to be alive is not the same thing as wanting to be dead. It’s hard to tell non-grieving people that, though, as people understandably get worried about your safety. And because people tend to get upset when we talk about not wanting to be alive, we just stop talking about it altogether. That’s dangerous.

All those encouragements from others about having so much to live for, that there’s still goodness to come in your life—they feel irrelevant. They kind of are irrelevant. You can’t cheerlead yourself out of the depths of grief.

Pain wants to be heard. It deserves to be heard. Denying or minimizing the reality of pain makes it worse. Telling the truth about the immensity of your pain—which is another way of paying attention—makes things different, if not better.

Your pain needs space. Room to unfold. I think this is why we seek out natural landscapes that are larger than us. Not just in grief, but often in grief. The expanding horizon line, the sense of limitless space, a landscape wide and deep and vast enough to hold what is—we need those places.

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. Part of building your trust in yourself lies in creating that framework, adding safety to the prospect of looking for pain.

What would you need in order to feel more supported inside your pain? How can we make an impossible situation more kind, gentler, and easier on your heart? • You might address your pain as a separate being: “In order to feel safe enough to face you, I would need . . .” • You might begin a free write with the line: “If you want me to breathe in this wreckage . . .”

I don’t mean this as a downer but simply as a reality check: tools that work outside grief aren’t always useful inside grief.

Self-kindness is seriously difficult. We can talk all day about how other people deserve kindness, but when it comes to ourselves? Forget it. We know too much about our own short-comings, the ways we’ve messed things up, just how badly we’re doing everything. We treat ourselves far more harshly than we would ever allow anyone else to treat us. Everyone struggles with this; it’s not just you. For many people, being kind to others is far, far easier.