If you’re reading this, I’m guessing you didn’t sign up for this particular club.
You didn’t want to know how grief tastes and you didn’t want to be an expert in absence. But here you are, carrying something you never asked for and can’t put down.
I wish I could tell you I’m just a grief professional who’s studied all the right books. But I’m here as someone who’s been gutted by it… more than once. I’ve buried three of my children and my husband. I’ve walked into rooms that will never feel the same again. And even with years of practice helping others navigate their pain, there are still mornings I wake up and think, I can’t do this today.
So if that’s you right now, if you’re staring at the wall or scrolling because you can’t sleep, please know: Your pain makes sense, and everything that doesn’t make sense also makes sense.
What healing actually means when you’re grieving
Whoever told you that healing looks like forgetting this ever happened and simply moving on, probably meant well, but it’s not true. The immense loss you have gone through will never not stop hurting. Chances are, you’ll never wake up one morning and not care anymore. And maybe that’s why healing feels so hard, because it looks like learning how to live with this hole in your life without falling into it every single day.
Some days will be better than others. You’ll go through the day, maybe you’ll laugh with a friend, and maybe even forget for a few hours. Other days, it will hit you so hard you’ll wonder if you’ve made any progress at all. And that’s just how grief really looks like; messy and nonlinear.
Why you can’t skip the pain
Heart crushing pain makes us want to outpace it, to do everything we can to not let it break us. It can look like taking care of other people, and or staying busy every second of every single day, and trying so very hard to fall asleep quickly at night because we can’t afford to actually feel it.
That’s the fear if we let it all in (if we actually feel the full weight of it), we might never come back out. And it does have the potential to work… for a bit atleast. But if you keep avoiding the pain, it will find other quieter places in you to live. The term for this is unresolved grief, and there’s real dangers to choosing to do this.
It starts to live in your stomach, or your chest, or that ache behind your eyes that never fully clears. It creeps into your sleep, your patience, your capacity to feel anything at all. It shows up as irritability, or numbness, or a grief exhaustion that makes everything feel ten times heavier than it should.
The only way through is feeling it. Sometimes that can mean a single cathartic breakdown moment. But for most people, this feeling of pain is a slow process that demands support from wherever you can find it.
And if that’s something you’re willing to try now, even a tiny bit, you have to come to terms with how much this grief hurts.
The myth of closure and what to look for instead
Closure is a comforting idea until you’re the one grieving. It gets handed out like a destination; something you’re supposed to find after the right ritual or conversation or amount of time has passed. It shows up in well-meaning phrases like “you need closure” or “once you get closure, it’ll get easier.” And maybe for some people, that word fits. But for most of us who’ve lost someone we can’t imagine living without, closure never really arrives.
You need to stop expecting for grief to end in a clean, tidy way. And once you do that, you start to realize that what you’re looking for might actually be a way to keep living without pretending that what happened is somehow complete or over.
You can have days where the pain doesn’t swallow you whole, you can build rituals that keep their memory alive without keeping you stuck, you can speak their name and feel something other than collapse.
If you’ve been waiting for closure to signal that you’re allowed to keep living, maybe this is your permission instead: you’re allowed to stop waiting.
The early days: when you’re just trying to breathe
Grief doesn’t come bearing an invite. It slams open the door to your life and suddenly everything that used to feel simple (drinking water, checking the mail, answering a text) feels impossible. When you experience loss, especially sudden loss, you might be up and walking around, but your body knows that something is wrong, even if your mind is still trying to catch up.
Your body is in shock
In the first few days, or weeks, or even months, there’s often a strange kind of detachment. It’s like time stops existing, and you move through things like you’re moving through a fog. For me, it looked like forgetting what day it was, eating food without really tasting it, and waking up after a long sleep without feeling like I ever went to sleep in the first place.
I simply went through the motions, and looking back I realise it was my body’s way of protecting me from immense pain and overwhelm.
So here’s what I can tell you about the early days of navigating grief: you’re supposed to feel disoriented. Your system is trying to keep you upright while your world is falling apart. So if you’re feeling foggy, slow, or emotionally flat, that’s grief working its way through your body before it can even reach your thoughts. If you’re in this part of grief healing right now, let it take its time.
What’s happening in your nervous system (and why rest feels impossible)
To your nervous system, loss feels like an emergency, because in a way, it is. So if you’ve found yourself constantly tense, if your breath is shallow, if you can’t sit still or can’t get out of bed, it’s because your body is trying to keep you alive.
Rest might feel impossible right now. You’re not doing it wrong if your brain won’t stop spinning at 2 a.m., or if your muscles stay clenched no matter how many deep breaths you take. What you’re feeling is real. Your body just doesn’t know how to get through grief, and it needs time to trust that it can slow down without something falling apart.
Time stretches and disappears
One of the hardest things about grief is how it distorts your sense of time. You might look up and realize you don’t remember anything about the last two hours, or the last two weeks. You might feel like the loss happened yesterday, even if months have passed. You might feel like it’s been forever, even if it’s only been a few days.
The worst part is that time remains the same for the people around you. They start asking about your future, about logistics, about decisions you’re not ready to make. Meanwhile, you’re still stuck on the moment when everything changed.
This time distortion is a normal part of grief healing, and although it is scary, it won’t last forever. Your job right now isn’t to fix the fog. It’s to move through it as gently as possible.
If you’re still finding your feet, begin with the free grief course
When I was deep in it (after Johnny, then Reggie, then Miah) I didn’t know how to find my feet again. And I remember thinking, Why isn’t there something for this? Something real, something that doesn’t rush me or ask me to be okay yet?
That’s why I created this course.
If you’re still in that fog where everything feels heavy, this course might help you take one small breath that doesn’t hurt as much. Inside, you’ll find:
- A gentle introduction to controlled grief
- A way to begin naming your pain without needing to fix it
- Tools from the Mentally Strong Method to organize your thoughts when everything feels like too much
- Support that comes from lived experience, not just theory
If all you do is listen to one session while lying in bed, that’s enough. Get instant access to the free grief course here
How to begin your grief healing journey (without pretending you’re ready)
Most people don’t begin their grief healing journey because they feel strong enough to do it. They start because the pain has started bleeding into places that used to feel manageable.
That realization is enough, you only need enough space in yourself to say, “something hurts, and I don’t want to keep pretending it doesn’t.” What people call a healing journey is often just a long series of quiet, almost invisible shifts. You notice you’re no longer avoiding their name, you stop skipping the aisle in the store where their favorite cereal used to be, you let yourself cry without immediately trying to shut it down, and you say something honest instead of something rehearsed.
Step one: choosing to grieve (even when you’d rather not)
After Johnny died, I kept going. I focused on the kids who were still here, on the trauma they carried, on surviving another day. After Reggie, I thought I had tools; I created space for the pain and kept going. But after Miah, everything collapsed. There wasn’t a version of me left that could keep pretending, and that’s when I chose grief—as a structure to hold me up while I let the pain in.
For me, that looked like 45 days of focused grief where I allowed myself to completely break and let the pain in. I allowed my body to take the lead, and I provided it with the resources I had curated over the years to help through the process. If you’d like to see how my grief healing journey looked like, click here to get access to my documentary..
You don’t have to do it like I did. You just have to decide that the pain deserves your presence and you get to make that decision in a way that belongs only to you.
Step two: making space for grief in a world that wants you to perform
Grief is one thing. Grieving publicly, in a culture that doesn’t know what to do with pain, is another.
People mean well, but their discomfort can start to mold you and you slowly learn which versions of your sadness are acceptable. And before long, you’re performing resilience instead of living honestly.
You’re absolutely allowed to have days when you can’t answer texts, you’re allowed to say “I’m not okay” without adding a silver lining, and you’re allowed to feel what you feel, even if it makes someone else shift in their seat.
Start by creating at least one space in your life where you don’t have to pretend. It could be a friend who can hear the hard truths, or a journal that exists only to let the pain out, or a therapist who can hold the silence without rushing to fill it. And while you create these spaces, remember that you don’t owe anyone a tidy version of what you’ve lived through.
Take the first step to creating a space for your grief by speaking with a grief counsellor. Book an appointment here.
Step three: name the pain so it doesn’t name you
By now we’ve discussed in detail how trying to outrun the pain will only result in the same pain becoming a rigid part of your life. That unresolved grief will follow you to work, show up in your parenting, and settle into your chest like it belongs there. You will start to build your life around it without even realizing you’re doing it.
The alternative to that reality is naming your pain to give yourself that piece of power back. It might sound like, “I miss him every day.” Or, “I’m still angry she’s gone.” Or, “I feel completely disconnected from who I used to be.”
When I did my grief healing journey, this is where I started: with the raw, unfiltered truths I had been avoiding. And sure, some of them didn’t change, but they got lighter when I stopped pretending they didn’t exist.
Your grief deserves to be spoken, in whatever capacity you can afford to allow it.
What healing might look like (even if it’s still messy)
Maybe the only goal of healing is to wake up one morning and notice the pain is still there, but it now has a companion; the ability to hold it without falling apart.
Here’s some of the shapes healing can take:
- You let yourself laugh and don’t follow it with guilt
- You stop running from the pain
- You stop bracing for impact every time you see their name
- You say yes to happiness, even when the grief sits heavy on your chest
So if you’re starting to feel anything again (beyond the shutdown and the numbness) that’s a sign you’re returning to yourself, even if it’s slow.
If you’re ready for serious grief healing, there’s space for that too
If the pain is still raw, if just getting through the day takes everything you have, there is no urgency here. Embrace this season of grief, and allow yourself to just breathe and survive through it.
But if you’ve made it through that first fog, and your body is telling you it’s time to do more than survive, there’s a space I’ve created for exactly that.
The Mentally Strong Intensive is a 3-day, in-person retreat designed for people who are tired of carrying their grief alone. It’s a space you can come into without having to perform a version of you that’s more digestible. You just have to show up as you are; heart cracked open, unsure what comes next, but willing to be honest.
Over three days, we’ll work together on:
- Learning the Mentally Strong Method, so you can organize your grief, trauma, and daily overwhelm into something that makes sense
- Mapping out your mental and emotional pain points, so you’re actually working with them
- Creating a personalized healing plan that aligns with your values, not anyone else’s timeline
- Exploring your identity after loss: who you are now, and who you’re becoming
- Practicing real techniques for self-regulation, emotional expression, and long-term resilience
You’ll leave with tools that will help with navigating grief, and you’ll leave with language for what’s been unspeakable. And most of all, you’ll leave knowing that healing isn’t something you have to do alone.
You’ve already made it this far. If this is your next step, you’ll know.