A Tenuous Truce with Grief
On learning to sit with and experience grief instead of avoiding or outrunning it.
Dear Reader,
I am struggling. I am struggling more than I have in a long time. For the last several weeks, my grief has taken on a new form. Where in the first months after loss, grief felt like a cocoon—a blanket to wrap myself in and let the depth of emotion consume me—lately that same blanket feels like it’s suffocating me instead.
At first, my grief slowed me down in ways that felt almost protective. I canceled plans without shame. I rested without resistance. I cried when I needed to. I didn’t argue with what was happening inside me. I let it be what it was.
But somewhere along the way, my grief shifted. Or perhaps it’s just my response to the grief that shifted…
Without realizing it at first, I started to feel trapped by the very thing that had once made me feel held. The cocoon tightened. The quiet became too loud. The slowness began to feel like stagnation. And I found myself wanting out—out of the slowness, out of the ache, out of the waiting to be okay again.
This is the part I never learned to move through with grace: the moment when grief stops feeling like shelter and starts feeling like a cage.
I can feel myself pushing against the slowness that grief demands. Reaching for my old ways of self-soothing: intellectualizing and dissociating. I keep trying to rejoin the world of the living and then being pulled back under by waves of grief. Some days I let myself be pulled under. I honor that grief needs me to move slowly. To experience it. To sit with it. But lately, most days I rage against it, pushing myself to keep moving, keep stepping, keep living.
I feel an internal pressure to keep carrying on. Like it’s what is expected. Like it’s what our world demands. But if I am honest, that pressure comes from within me. From the part of me that wants to prove I am resilient. From the part that equates rest with failure. From the part that believes I should be “better by now.”
So I start bargaining with my grief.
Just one more productive day.
Just one more stretch of pretending.
Just one more version of myself that looks healed from the outside.
And when I can’t sustain that performance, I feel like I’m falling behind an invisible timeline. Grief is not interested in efficiency or productivity. It is not impressed by how quickly we return to routine. Grief demands presence. And to be frank, I am tired of being present in it. Because it hurts. It fucking hurts. And I am tired of hurting. So I have been trying to outrun it.
But the more I try to outrun my grief, the more it shows up in other ways.
It shows up in my body. In my sleep. In my relationships. In the empty numbness that follows forced productivity. In the sudden crashes after I’ve pushed myself too far.
And slowly I am accepting that avoidance doesn’t free us from grief. It just spreads it out across our lives in quieter, more confusing ways.
I want to believe grief is a companion. I really do. That it walks beside me not to punish me, but to remind me that I loved deeply. That grief stays with me to give me somewhere to put all the love I can no longer give to its intended recipient.
Some days I can manage to hold that belief. Other days I resent it.
Some days I walk with my grief in a reluctant truce. Other days it feels like we are locked in a stalemate—neither of us willing to move first.
For now, I am not at peace with grief. But I am trying desperately to stop being at war with it either. I am letting grief slow me down again.
Letting grief slow me down is awkward. Unproductive. Inconvenient.
It looks like: saying no when I a past version of me would say yes. Leaving dishes in the sink because feeding myself took all the energy I had left. Canceling plans last minute because the idea of putting on a mask of okayness is too much to bear. Writing less than I think I “should.”
It looks like choosing regulation, rest, and uncomfortable honesty with myself and with the people who love me.
I don’t know what your grief looks like or how exactly it feels. But I do know this:
If you are exhausted in ways sleep can’t touch…
If you feel behind and like you can’t catch up…
If you feel like you are constantly bracing for impact…
Your grief may not be asking you to try harder. It may be asking you to slow down and sit with it. Sit with the hurt, the anger, and whatever emotions your grief is trying to help you process.
You don’t have to let yourself drown in it, but don’t abandon it either.
With love and a tenuous truce with grief,
Jen, Maggie’s Mom
For paid subscribers:
In the paid section, I go deeper into the awkward, unflattering, disruptive reality of grief. I also share the exact questions I’m sitting with right now as I try to stop avoiding and start processing again.
