Grief Does Not Look the Same for Everyone | Bonus
This episode is part of The Things We Carry, a solo series shaped by the themes that stay with me long after the conversations on The Life Shift.
Today, I am talking about the way grief shows up differently for each of us. Grief is not a single feeling. It is not one path or one expression. It shifts. It breaks open. It softens. It surprises you. And sometimes it says the opposite of what you think it should.
In this reflection, I talk about the pressure many of us feel to grieve a certain way, the fear of getting it wrong, and the quiet shame that comes from comparing our grief to someone else’s. Some days you may cry. Some days you may laugh. Some days you may be numb or angry or exhausted. All of it is real. All of it is allowed. Grief has no finish line and no proper form. It simply becomes part of who we are.
If you are carrying grief in any shape, I hope this episode gives you space to be honest about what it looks like for you. You do not need to perform it. You do not need to justify it. You can name the feelings, even the unexpected ones, and let them belong. There is room for your version of grief. There always has been.
This is the mini solo series, The Things We Carry, small moments and themes that keep me thinking way after the conversations on the Life Shift podcast. Hey again, here is one of these solo episodes in which I kind of talk about some of the themes on the Life Shift podcast. And this one is about grief again, but a little bit of a different focus and about the way grief shows up in all of us so differently. And it's not really about how people deal with loss, but how deeply personal and varying the whole experience can be. And so many of my guests talk about grief, and it's always so different. Carol and I talked about how we all need to allow ourselves to feel however we're feeling at any moment. Sometimes I catch myself, and maybe you do too, questioning the legitimacy of our own feelings. Am I doing it right? Am I grieving properly? Should I be more sad or should I be less sad? And Carol's conversation with me reminded me that it's okay if some days I laugh when I think I should be crying or if I'm angry one minute and numb the next. That permission to just be where we are, no matter how messy or confusing, is so freeing. It's not a rule book. It's more like grace. Mary Ann added a layer to that. She talked about rage. how it can bubble up in grief and feel ugly or wrong, but it's real and it needs its own space. Rage is part of the messiness that no one talks about enough. It's not something that we expect, especially when your toll grief means sorrow and tears, but it can also be fury, frustration, or just numb anger. And hearing her speak so openly about it made me realize that I certainly buried some of that rage myself. I guess I'm ashamed to admit it, but maybe not. It's just part of the journey, part of honoring the full spectrum of what it means to lose. And then there's Brianna's story. She lost her dog and shared how that grief was unexpected and intense in ways that she hadn't anticipated. It made me reflect on how we often rank grief as if losing a pet is less than losing a person. But grief is grief. It's the love and connection that was there that gets broken regardless of who or what you lose. She talked about how she made friends with her grief instead of pushing it away, and it carved out this new identity that includes the absence and the presence of that love. That felt like this beautiful invitation to me to always welcome what grief has to teach me. What connects all these stories is the honesty that grief is not pretty. It doesn't have a clear stage one, two, three, or even a finish line. And I remember feeling like I had to get over my mom's death quickly because the people around me seemed to want that. I was supposed to perform my grief in a way that others expected. But it took decades to even understand what grieving meant for me. I had to unlearn the idea that grief ought to look a particular way and really give myself permission to feel all the contradictions inside me. I guess I'm still learning and I'm still in process. And I think there's something nice about admitting that. I don't know if anyone has it all figured out. Some days are we head one way and then some days we go sideways and then sometimes we don't feel like we're moving at all. And I think that is also okay because it's human. It's just real. So if you're listening and you're carrying grief, whether you've had it forever or it just is something new for you, let's notice what your grief looks like to you. And maybe there's a moment you can name where you start to feel better or something that you do makes you feel a certain way. Maybe it's something you've been resisting or it's a feeling that you've been afraid to own. So I'm here with you in that. And I'm still learning how to sit with my own grief in all the different shapes that it takes. And we all should know that there is no one right way to do it. It doesn't look the same for everyone. And that's exactly as it should be.
