What happens when we give ourselves permission to just… be?

Wonderings of late

My grandfather died on the 7th of May, and I’ve felt myself unravelling since then.
Grief is so strange—so encompassing, so confronting. It’s big, it’s confusing, and sometimes there are simply no words.

When you spend your whole life suppressing things that need to be felt, grief has a way of gnawing right through, and you feel everything slowly starting to bubble over. So what then? What happens when we give ourselves permission to just… be? To put aside perfection and performance, and just sit in whatever we’re feeling?

That’s the question my grief has unearthed.

Intellectualising, contextualising, and trying to make sense of things won’t pull you out of the abyss. But maybe what helps is finally letting yourself sit in what you feel—drenched, immobilised, ugly, and unpalatable—as you begin to breathe a sigh of relief that you can simply… be.