on Loss…

Dealing with loss isn't something you wake up and know how to do. It's years of swallowing grief whole. Years of seeing patterns from the living that you'll lose, while knowing losing anyone or anything to death is drastically different. It's not having the space to truly mourn your losses because they're minimized and conflated with the inability to "just let go." It's accepting that despite still putting one foot in front of the other, there are crumbled pieces of your life that'll never be whole again.

Loss is so much more than not being able to find what's missing. It's an acceptance of something you can't fix, no matter the ideal circumstances. Sometimes that impossibility is due to the loss literally being death; other times, it involves death of circumstance. Either way, no one wakes up knowing how to do it; a lot of us won't ever master the art of living comfortably with our loss or having healthy coping mechanisms.

If you've figured it out, congratulations. You've got a skill worth knowing.