Are you over it? Have you started to move on?

 

These are questions which people ask. The answer feels simple to me. 

I will never be over it. 

I will never move on. 

But I don't want to be that person who is stuck in their grief. 

Instead, I feel I am moving forward. 

It's a naive point of view that all you have to do is "get through your grief"; that somehow grief needs to be gotten through to get to a set destination. But closure isn't the goal! Quite the reverse actually. Grief is a messy, complex process which needs a lot of hard work. It's exhausting and it stays with you. 

Grief is individual. Some people feel better about 2 years others find after 2 years things get hard again. Other people's expectations of grief can be hard. My own expectation of what grief was and how it would pan out was hard as I couldn't match my own expectation. I was expecting to be so much 'further on' after all the firsts. Then again after the second year I felt like timehad move on, others had moved forward. The world had moved forward. But I wasn't where I expected myself to be. Surley after 730 days I would have reinvented myself.... er no... I am still just me. 

Often the expectation of where we and others think we should be is informed by being "uncomfortable". For me I just want to feel like ME again. For them they also just want to feel confortable around you, so everyone can get back to be NORMAL. But there's no such going back. There is no way of getting back to that normal. Instead there has to develop a NEW NORMAL. 

I say this because you don't heal after grief and there is no trace of what you have been through. It is important to realise that there is a wound, often an open wound. A wound which starts to heal but whose head can be knocked off and bleed. 

Once I begun to realise and accept that you don't "get over it", you don't get "closure", it helped to deal with the pressure from others to "be over it".  

I am gradually moving forward and taking my grief with me. 

H xx