There is So Much to Grieve
Some thoughts on living inside the experience of collective loss - and what it means to finally feel it.
Something feels heavy right now. You may not be able to say exactly what it is, or describe it. It isn’t one single thing, not a specific loss you can point to. It lives in the scrolling and the self-doubt - in the way certain conversations leave you exhausted, in the quiet sense that the world you count on has shifted beneath your feet.
That heaviness has a name. It’s grief. No, not personal grief necessarily; though, it may be that, too. It’s collective grief - the mourning that accumulates when the world is in crisis and there’s no funeral to attend, no clear moment of loss to mark, no socially sanctioned space in which to fall apart.
What Hamnet Shows Us
Maggie O’Farrell’s novel adapted to film Hamnet holds something essential about where we are right now. To witness the way that catastrophe travels invisibly through ordinary things and simple lives. The way grief continues while the world keeps moving. The way loss fragments a family, a self, and an understanding of what used to be.
What draws people to this story is Agnes, the mother at the heart of it all. She grieves with her whole body. She does not perform or placate. She does not seal herself off from her emotions to keep functioning. There is something fierce and whole about her suffering. And, there is something deeply recognizable in it, which is why so many were drawn in during that final scene. For those that have tried to grieve quietly inside a world that doesn’t stop, her full expression of grief is cathartic.
We live in that world now. Geopolitical violence streams across our phones. Political fracture cuts through relationships. A low, but persistent dread has settled in. While not dramatic enough to name out loud, it is heavy enough to change the feeling of our ordinary. Like Agnes, many of us are grieving without permission, in the areas of our lives that are supposed to look fine.
The Parts That Protect You From Feeling It
When grief is too large to diffuse or to hold, we find ways to not hold it. We stay busy. We go numb. We become furious about smaller things. We scroll. None of these are failures. They are ways that different parts of us try to manage what feels unmanageable. Our parts are endlessly inventive in their protection of us.
Underneath the busyness and the numbness, the grief is still there. It needs somewhere to go, to be. It does not need to be solved, reframed, or put in perspective. It needs to be felt, witnessed, and acknowledged as real. The therapeutic relationship can offer that space where the unnamed thing is named and the heavy weight gets shared.
Something shifts when we stop trying to outrun our emotions and what we’re carrying. Certainly, not because the world gets easier, but because we stop spending so much of our energy keeping it at a distance. There is a particular kind of relief that comes from finally saying, out loud, to another person, “I am grieving.” You may not know exactly what, and that’s okay because you don’t have to in that space. You may have a part of you that deeply knows the world is not okay. And, you may have other parts of you that have been trying very hard to be okay anyway.
You Don’t Have to Justify the Weight
If you have been feeling something you can’t quite name, but feels heavier than stress, quieter than crisis, and present in a way that doesn’t seem to resolve - I want you to know, that is real. You don’t need a specific tragedy or reason to deserve support. Collective grief is grief. And you are allowed to feel it.
Therapy, at its best, is not about fixing what’s broken. It’s about making room for yourself to listen to those parts of you that have been protecting you, and those parts that may have been pushed away. If you’re ready to explore what you’ve been carrying lately, to bring it into a space where it can finally breathe, I’d be honored to sit with you in it.
