I’ve been thinking a lot about grief and loss recently. I’ve worked through my thoughts and feelings on my experience of grief and loss in my own head and through counselling, but I’ve never written any of it down.

So here it goes…

1. I grieve every day. Not always for the same things, but always for something. The grief that never leaves me is for the people I’ve lost in my life; my dad, other family members and people I knew but wasn’t particularly close with, yet whom still impacted my life and changed me and my thinking in one way or another.
2. I grieve for the relationships and friendships that have changed no matter how hard I try to not let them. I’m grateful to still have these people in my life in any capacity, but I’m sad for the ways things are different as we grow older. I know life moves on and we all grow at different paces but there are milestones friends are now experiencing that I can’t relate to and that changes our relationship even if we don’t want it to.
3. I grieve for previous versions of myself which are long gone; for the life that could have been, and that I always thought I would have, if certain things hadn’t happened or if I’d made different decisions.
4. I grieve for the years I lost and the time I can’t get back when I was in a depressive fog; existing but not really living.
5. I grieve for the confidence and optimism I lost at 22 that if I’m honest I’ve never really regained. For the younger version of me that expected to exist in a world where walking at lunch in the city I grew up in wouldn’t lead to something traumatic.
6. I grieve for happy moments once they’re over; even though I know I’m truly experiencing happiness in that moment, I’m sad knowing it won’t last.

Despite all this, I know that I’ve learned from these feelings and emotions and I know it’s shaped me into the person I am today.

1. I know it’s made me gain perspective and maturity I would probably never have had so early in life if I hadn’t gone through these experiences.
2. I know how important it is to feel all my feelings and to think all my thoughts because that’s part of the process.
3. I know it’s important to accept situations for what they are and to keep moving, or I’ll end up stuck – back to existing and not really living.
4. I know it’s important to talk about grief and loss and death, because it’s all too often hushed and seen as too morbid but talking about it openly isn’t shameful.
5. I know that even though people and experiences might be lost, I still have memories that I can relive over and over again. I take a lot of photos in my life and this is part of why; it helps me relive happy moments and it’s a coping mechanism for the sadness I know I’ll feel when that moment is over.

Things I want to remember:

Grief is inevitable – it’s a part of life. Everyone will experience it in some capacity and at some point, so we need to talk about it. It’s not a shameful secret.

It’s never ending. You might get better at managing your response to it and at handling your feelings but it’ll never go away.

Feeling the losses in your life is not mutually exclusive with experiencing happy times; they can, and do, coexist.