Your Grief is Your Grief
Shannon Casey
Day 1 of 7: Your Grief is Your Grief
“Be excessively gentle with yourself.”
-John O’Donohue, “For One Who Is Exhausted, a Blessing”
Most often, people associate the word “grief” with death, but grief can show up in any situation that involves significant loss. Maybe your particular grief is the result of a difficult breakup, a cancelled graduation ceremony, or the loss of a sense of safety and security.
Grief is a universal experience, but it is not a singular experience. It can take many forms, and it can manifest in different ways. Even when grief is collective, it is also individualized, multi-faceted, and dynamic. Therefore, the most important rule of thumb when it comes to grief is “don’t compare.” Your loss is your loss; your grief is your grief.
Naming our grief and giving ourselves permission to own it is the first step to finding our way through it. We can’t speed up the grieving process, we can’t go around it, and we can’t skip the parts of it we don’t like. What we can do, though, is sit with it. We can feel our feelings. We can be gentle with ourselves and with each other. We can learn to tolerate — and perhaps even embrace — uncertainty. We can acknowledge the reality that sometimes, plans change. In the midst of overwhelming chaos, we can find avenues of empowerment.
These are some of the aspects of the grieving process that we’ll delve into over this next week, but for now, what’s one way that you can be excessively gentle with yourself today?
Shannon Casey (she/her)
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