If You've Never Sat with Grief

If you’ve never sat with grief, let me tell you—
It isn’t what you think.

It’s not just sadness.
It’s violent.
It rips through your body, leaving you sick, exhausted, and disoriented.

Grief makes you physically ill.

Your stomach twists until you feel like you’re going to throw up.
Your head pounds relentlessly.
Your chest tightens like it’s collapsing in on itself.

You move through days in a fog, forgetting what you’re doing, where you are, or why you even got up.

Your body shakes.
Your heart races.
Your throat closes with a lump that never fully leaves.
You are exhausted in a way that sleep cannot touch.

Grief doesn’t stay in your thoughts.
It moves through your entire body.

It doesn’t wait for convenient moments.
It hits while you’re driving, standing in line, sitting at work, trying to answer a simple question.

One second you think you’re functioning.
The next, it drops you to your knees internally while the rest of the world keeps talking around you.

People talk about grief like it’s sadness.
It’s not.

It feels like your body is trying to survive something it cannot understand.

And until you live it, you truly have no idea how brutal it can be.

That’s what grief is.
It changes everything.
And some parts of you never fully go back to who you were before.