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

by Megan Devine

We can love each other, standing in the full knowledge that what we love will die. We can love each other, knowing that feeling the other person’s pain is a sign of our connection, not our doom. It’s terrifying to love one another this way, but it’s the way we need to love. Our own personal lives and our larger, global, interconnected lives call us to love in this way. The middle ground of grief, the new model of grief, allows us to love each other that way. It’s the only way forward.

What I’ve outlined in this book is not about fixing your grief, nor is it about the future that awaits. It’s meant to help you survive—right here, right now. May you find something useful in these words.

what’s more effective than coming up with a solution for each scenario is to give you one way to respond to all of them. 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.

Platitudes, “self-help,” well-meaning advice, and suggestions—they’re all about getting you out of pain. Whenever we talk about how much we hurt, someone is right there to help make that pain go away. In this model, pain is a bad thing, and it must be removed. But your pain is valid. It won’t just go away.

pain, we have a biological need to express it. Pain that is not allowed to be spoken or expressed turns in on itself, and creates more problems.

One of the reasons our culture is so messed up around grief is that we’ve tried to erase pain before it’s had its say. We’ve got an emotional backlog sitting in our hearts.

The way to survive grief is by allowing pain to exist, not in trying to cover it up or rush through it.

Whether we’re talking about pain or about suffering, the underlying orientation is the same: allow yourself to experiment, to find what helps, to find what makes things just a little easier. Not because doing so will make this OK, but because doing so makes this gentler on you.

wellness thoughts versus worseness thoughts.

Basically, anything that pulls you away from love, pulls you away from kindness to yourself, or makes you feel completely

wellness thoughts, ideas, images, and the activities that help you feel more rooted and calm.

What things increase suffering? Which allow you to hold your pain more gently?

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

the abyss of suffering that always makes things worse.

you choose the crap because you don’t

GRIEF AND SUICIDALITY: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

For many people, continuing to wake up each morning is a disappointment: Damn, I’m still alive. Thoughts like that make perfect sense.

Not wanting to be alive is not the same thing as wanting to be dead.

You can’t cheerlead yourself out of the depths of grief.

It’s important to have at least one person in your life to whom you can be honest about your disinterest in survival.

There isn’t anything you need to do with your pain. Nothing you need to do about your pain. It simply is.

The way to come to pain is with

open eyes, and an open heart, committed to bearing witness to your own broken place. It won’t fix anything. And it changes everything.

Most people don’t intentionally ignore their pain. It’s not that we don’t want to bear witness to it; we’re just not sure what it takes to face it.

community

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.

The core “work” of grief really is learning to companion yourself inside it. But another equally important skill is in shutting off your grief, or your emotions, when it isn’t safe to feel them.

I’m not talking about shutting down your emotions as a long-term solution (that so does not work),

Denial is actually a kindness, at times. Distraction is a healthy coping strategy.

on the tangible, external, physical world. Stop the meltdown. Calm your brain. Stop the spiral from continuing.

When your pain is too big for the environment you’re in, it can turn into emotional flooding. Emotional

check: tools that work outside grief aren’t always useful inside grief. That’s why I have

If we boiled down everything in this book about how to survive intense grief, it would come down to this: show yourself kindness.

What kindness looks like will change, but your commitment to it? That’s where your safety is.

Respiration, heart rate, and nervous system responses are all partially regulated by close contact with familiar people and animals; these brain functions are all deeply affected when you’ve lost someone close.

In fact, in writing this book, my team and I argued about how long the chapters should be. Knowing how difficult it is to read and comprehend, we went back and forth over the length of each chapter.

If you take nothing else from this chapter, practice making your exhale longer than your inhale. It doesn’t even have to be a deep breath: just exhale for a moment longer. Experiment with it. See how it goes.

We need the creative process to bear witness to our own reality—to reflect our own pain back to us. In a world that so often doesn’t want to hear your pain, the page or the canvas or the sketch pad is always a willing companion.

When we separate the creative process from a need to solve or fix things, it becomes an ally.

While it’s not pain’s only role, pain often does call us into communication, even communion, with others.

Creative practices are a balm, and a support, inside what can barely be endured.

Recent studies show that engaging in as little as ten to fifteen minutes of creative writing can help reduce overall levels of cortisol, the “stress hormone,” in the body.

On the page, everything is allowed. Everything has a voice.

writing the true reality of their loss has helped them survive.

If you must do something, or you’re driving yourself nuts with overthinking, borrow someone else’s words or images for a while.

Your life, and your grief, are a work in progress. There is no need to be finished. There is no need to be perfect. There is only you, and the story of the love—and the loss—that brought you here. Find ways to tell your story.

We need a way to talk about both things—the reality of deep, persistent pain and the reality of living with that pain in a way that is gentle, authentic, and even beautiful. To do this, we need to talk about the words we use, and how we mean them.

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.

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.