Who told you that?

 

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red white black text, lines, boxes that read: who told you you had to get over it?

Not everyone understands the grief experience. Not everyone has the capacity to sit with ALL the various realms of grief. Especially the "toxic positivity" crowd will try to implicitly or explicitly saddle you with shame or guilt about "causing" more "bad" stuff if you hang around with the mess human stuff too long. THEY ARE NOT YOUR PEOPLE NOW. You can reconnect w them later if you want. But for the moments when grief is hard, messy, human, ugly, IMPOSSIBLE TO GET OVER, you need a different breed of folks who get it. Folks who can just sit without judgement or shaming you into change when change is impossible. It's not to say change will never come. But it is to say that when you are IN IT -- when you cannot "get over it," that is ok too! It is as ok as anything else!

You may find over time that you can make room for BOTH celebration AND grief. You can both have new things, new priorities, new experiences AND still feel heart broken over who and what was lost. None of these very messy human experiences is mutually exclusive from the other.

And when you start feeling badly about "not being over it yet" or questioning "why is my grief stuff taking so long" or any other judgment type stuff, stop. Ponder for a few, "Who told you that???" Who laid that guilt trippy judgment stuff upon you? Whose voice is that? 

And what happens if you ignore that voice.

Allow a new voice.

Allow yourself some time and space and grace to TEND.

Part of raising your grief literacy is coming to understand what and how our needs change in the landscape post-loss. You can do this!