vika of the north

One day at a time.

This is not talked about enough and as a result ppl struggle to process grief bc the world is telling them that grief is something else.

Grief is about loss, and IF you’d like to define it as a loss of life it is not restricted to loss of life via death. Even then I’d implore you to not view grief as about death or life but again, just loss.

Grief is also about having a shitty childhood that nothing can fix even if you have healed from it as an adult; your childhood was shitty and there’s nothing retroactively you can do about it. You grieve the loss of thriving your past self was denied.

Grief is about friendships that ended abruptly, confusingly and again, there’s nothing you can do to change that. You just have to sit with it. This is the only way grief can ultimately be processed and all it wants by the way: to be accepted and sat with. That’s it.

Grief is about opportunities that have passed, experiences you can’t have because of the way situations have ended up, and having to accept that while you do have your whole future ahead of you, there were some things you wanted to be a certain way then and they weren’t, aren’t and will never be.

Grief is being estranged from your family and missing family closeness even though you do not want to be closer to your parents, because you’re grieving the fact that there is a healthy part of human life you will not experience through them.

Grief can be the job you lost, the plans that fell through, the events that spiraled out of your control

If grief is strictly about life and death, understand that it includes grieving the life you never had and the death of who you used to be, too.

But moreover, grief is about loss.

—–

James Baldwin, from If Beale Street Could Talk Florence and the Machine, from Various Storms & Saints Simone de Beauvoir, from a letter to Jean-Paul Sartre Fernando Pessoa, from The Book of Disquiet

Kai Coggin, from “Bluebirds Renting the Squash Studio”

it’s a series of negotiations you make with yourself over your whole life. it’s making one less self-deprecating joke. it’s looking at yourself in the mirror with a little more generosity. it’s forgiving yourself for that little mistake.

Christophe Jacrot