I often talk about grief as a healing energy.
Sometimes, people assume that means grief is gentle + soft.
And sometimes it is.
Sometimes, it invites deep rest + slows everything down + rocks us to sleep + asks us to just let go.
But it can also be fierce.
And this ferocity is healing too -- and often precisely the medicine we need.
I’ve noticed that my own grief lately has been more fierce than gentle, more intense than soft.
Because the loss is a big one (bigger than I was seeing or making room for), and I’d been avoiding it.
So the grief showed up as intensity to direct my attention to the truth I needed to see + speak -- and to what I needed to do to process the loss, be who I want to be through the experience, and take critical steps I’d been avoiding.
And while this wasn’t easy, I found I trusted my grief more after this.
Because it didn’t show up to calm me down, make me feel better, or tell me everything was going to be okay.
It showed up to tell me the truth + be with me through the gritty realness that felt impossible to confront without its help.
It reminded me that loss is devastating and that processing + healing through it is often gritty + intense work that asks something of us that’s not always easy to give.
And it connected me with my own power + ferocity (that supported me in all sorts of ways through the experience).
The intensity is exactly what I needed.
Grief is the energy that catches + holds + carries us through loss.
That helps us feel what we need to feel, see what we need to see, and tend to what needs tending.
Which means it often has to be fierce + intense to do its work.
And that it’s sometimes going to feel more like a broken bone being set into place than a soft lullaby to sleep.
Because our grief shows up to heal -- whether that healing looks like reset + reckoning, softness + ease, or something else entirely.
But no matter how it shows up or what it demands, we can trust our grief to tell the truth + be with us through the hard stuff.
And to me, that feels like good news.