Getting Along with Grief

I wrote a piece once called "Grief is Beautiful". I definitely feel this way, but it occurred to me that I haven’t shared in detail about what it was like to simply sit in the time of life where grief wasn’t beautiful. I haven’t shared how difficult it was to accept that grief was a part of my life, a constant companion, a new normal.

I consider it a bit of a character flaw that I have a hard time focusing on any of my negative opinions. I LOVE to be optimistic and unsinkable. I like to think of my spirit as uncrushable. But I also think it would be a mistake not to get real and authentic about how annoying grief can be.
I’m not referring here to processing the actual loss, i’m simply referring to a person’s relationship with the process of grieving itself.

Grief presents the person trying to get along with it many issues, but I intend to talk about just a few of those issues that I personally dealt with. My intention isn't to be a negative complainer, and to just B about my life. Instead my hope is that through sharing this and being vulnerable and authentic that someone else out there might feel a little less alone.

Here are some annoying things about trying to get along with grief.

1. Shame about not being able to control your emotions. 

This was a big one for me. I had always been a person who would choose joy and be optimistic as I stated above. Always the enthusiast (a little enneagram plug for those enneagramers out there). But once I was experiencing grief, I lost the ability to always have control over how I was feeling, or my responses. It. Was. Terrifying. It took a long time for me to be ready to participate in joy again. Even once I decided to participate it took a while to really feel it.

2. Social pressure to feel a certain way.

This doesn’t always mean that people are pressuring you to be happy. Sometimes it’s the total opposite. Sometimes people expect you to be upset by something or to have a really hard day. And they judge you a little bit if you don’t present those emotions outwardly. But I know from experience that I don’t always feel the way I’m expected to, and a lot of times I felt nothing at all. It felt better to be numb. Sometimes (I’m ashamed to say) I faked it so that I didn’t have to deal with questions or judgements.

3. It's unpredictable and comes in powerful waves.

Like a bad stomach flu, grief can hit you out of nowhere and knock you on your behind. Sometimes I’d walk away from a situation saying to myself "If I’d have known I was going to feel this way, i’d have made a different decision". You simply can’t prepare for it. There’s no battening down the hatches. Honestly, you can try, but chances are that you’ll mentally prepare for something that ends up being really easy and then something else totally random will sock you in the gut.

4. Freaking people out with your deep and life altering questions and musings.

For me, losing my father was a catalyst in my life. Everything that came after was indelibly altered by that circumstance. Life was going along one path and then my father took his life and it set all of his loved ones spinning in the collateral damage and chaos on a totally different path than before. I questioned mostly everything I believed about the world. Not only did I question everything, I did it out loud and in conversations with other people. I’m a verbal processor. ‘Talking things out’ is my modus operandi.

5. Grief is heavy. 

Grief is emotionally heavy, but I also found that I was physically exhausted as well as mentally. I slept longer, and felt lethargic more often. This had to do with depression and loss and all of that, that comes with grief. But also, it was just annoying to feel like I had no energy. And when you’re in the middle of grief you don’t always realize that your grief is why you’re so tired. So you feel like a failure on top of everything else.


Obviously grief is hard and not anyone’s first choice of thing to feel. And it’s annoying for all of the reasons that I listed above, but because I am who I am, I cannot end on a negative note. So I feel I have to tell you all that I believe there are aspects of grief that are truly beautiful. To read more about why I believe that click here.

I hope some of you feel less alone in not loving how grief feels, and I hope you go read my piece about why grief, although really hard, is actually quite beautiful. Be blessed, be at peace, and good luck in your process.