The Healing Power of Grief (And I've Been Missing It My Whole Life)

The Friday Edition | No. 60

This Is Grief (And I’ve Been Missing It My Whole Life)

I’ve been sitting in grief today. A heavy kind of dull weight. Not the sharp kind that pierces through your chest like arrows, but the undertow kind. The unrelenting, slow, dragging kind that holds you beneath the surface. I didn’t fight it. For once. I didn’t try to “fix” it. I didn’t try to do anything. I just let it take me over. I just let it be. Let me be.

And maybe for the first time, I saw it for what it was.

Grief.

Not depression. Not weakness. Not laziness. Not overwhelming exhaustion. Not overreacting or dwelling in the past.

Just... grief.

I don’t know if I’ve ever really known grief before. I think I’ve probably mislabeled it every time it showed up. Called it anxiety. Called it fatigue. Called it rage. Called it dysfunction. Probably even called it a hormone imbalance, and internalized it as my brokenness. My unworthiness. A flaw in my character that has never allowed me to get over it or fix it *sigh.

But the truth is: I’ve been grieving my whole damn life, and I didn’t even know it.

And no one told me. Not the therapists. Not the doctors. Not the people who were supposed to know. No one said, “Hey, what you’re carrying - that dead weight in your chest and behind your eyes, in the migraine, and aches and pains that won’t go away - is grief.” Not grief over a person who died. But over you - what was lost, stolen, hurt, degraded, never nurtured, never protected. That’s grief, too.

Why the hell is this not talked about?

It’s bullshit that grief only gets framed in those clean, perfect “stages” you read about in pamphlets at hospitals or funeral homes. Grief isn’t just about death. It’s about what was destroyed while you were still alive. The childhood you never got. The toxic parents who never parented like good parents are supposed to do. The dignity that was ripped out of you. The parts of yourself you had to sever and abandon and push away into deep, dark corners of your being just to survive.

I’m grieving now because I finally see (more than I ever have ) that I was hurt. Not just bruised or damaged in passing - but targeted. Manipulated. Gaslighted. Scapegoated. Used as a dumping ground for everyone else’s shit. I was not the problem. I was not bad or wrong or unworthy. I was just the inconvenient truth teller - the one who saw through the dysfunction. I was an easy mark in a broken system - family, society, all of it - that feeds off silence and shame and staying small and keeping abuse silent and behind closed doors.

Healing Generational Trauma You Never Chose to Carry