joy is not the absence of grief

oh hey friends.

Some thoughts on grief —>

In 1996, Dr. Lois Tonkin was in a workshop with a woman’s whose child had died some years before. The woman drew a picture that described how she thought her grief would change as the years passed. In the picture, she drew a circle to represent her life and filled the circle to represent her grief. At first, grief was all consuming. She thought as time went by, the grief would grow smaller and smaller. But that isn’t what happened. She drew another picture. In this picture, the grief remained the same size and instead, the circle that represented her life grew bigger. Her grief was always there, always present, her life just grew to make room for her loss.

There a few visuals that I’ve seen that kind of show what she’s talking about :

And I think it’s really true. As I’ve been writing my manuscript for my book, I’m revisiting a lot of really difficult stories from my life and experiencing them as if they’d just happened. It’s like the grief is just … there. I don’t really notice it that often anymore, unless there’s some kind of trigger , but I can sure visit whenever I want to. It’s never far from me. Always sitting there, waiting for me to feel it deeply again.