Blindsided on an idle Tuesday...
When loss hits, suddenly the world feels different. You’re moving through your days, doing what you’ve always done and then something changes - without warning, without notice and without permission. it leaves all sorts of things behind. It could be a goodbye you didn’t want to say, an absence you didn’t choose, a change you weren’t ready for. You can still see your life, still recognise the pieces of it, but everything feels different and somehow sadder.
Grief isn’t just sadness though. It could be exhaustion, irritability, numbness, fear, longing or even a sense of detachment from the world around you. You might find yourself staring at a task you’ve done a thousand times, making a cup of tea, replying to a message and suddenly it feels impossible. Even small things feel monumental. It’s a strange kind of pain though. You know you’re functioning, you know you’re capable, you know you’ve lived through hard things before. And yet when the grief settles in, it feels like nothing will ever be the same again.
It doesn’t announce itself loudly. It shows up in the quiet moments. When you reach for someone who isn’t there, when you remember something you can’t get back, when you realise life has moved without your permission. And the longer the grief sits, the more solid it becomes. Before you know it, the ache overtakes everything, and now you’re not just sad, instead you’re carrying something that feels too massive for words.
If you’ve noticed this hurt lingering, resurfacing or shaping the way you move through the world, it might be worth exploring what’s underneath it. Sometimes grief is about the person or thing you lost. Sometimes it’s about what that loss represents. It could represent safety, identity, connection or even possibility.
Therapy offers a space to gently unpack all of this without judgement, pressure or the expectation that you should already be “over it". It’s possible to explore what grief is holding, what it’s protecting and what it’s asking of you. From there, you can begin to build ways of living alongside it rather than being swallowed by it.
You don’t have to navigate this hurt alone.