Grief and Loss

Trauma isn't always what happened to you. Sometimes, trauma is what didn't happen. It is the love, safety, warmth, and attunement that stayed missing.

to be "over" grief, is to oversimplify grief. for we don't get over it, we move through it. grief is not tied in a neat bow, or tucked away in a tidy box. it is messy, it is heavy, it is human. we carry it, we sit in it, we hold it, and it holds us in return. the idea that we are supposed to just "get over it" is to devalue our human experience, and to devalue our extent of loss, and of love.

grief is everywhere, it is not restricted to the bigger moments or milestones it finds us in the quiet, and in the mundane, the pieces of ordinary within our day to day grief illuminates in the chaos and overwhelm. and echoes in the spaces left behind. grief is everywhere, the guilt within laughter, the words unsaid, and the dreams unshared, grief will not always yell, and though sometimes she may whisper, we feel her weight, her presence, all the same. grief is everywhere, e

April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month and i want you to know, your story is your strength. even when its feels heavy, fractured, and hard to hold. your voice matters, even when it shakes, even if it stays unspoken. even if all you have done is survive, that is enough. your body remembers, your nervous system protects. what happened to you was not your fault, the weight of their harm wasn't yours to carry. you deserved to feel safe, you deserved to be protected. you deserved

sometimes trauma is in the big moments, the things that we see, the things that feel obvious, the things that happened to us. and sometimes, when we feel confused about our bigger emotions, and we replay our life, in search of these seemingly bigger moments, we come up at a loss. not realising we are searching for something that wasn't there. that the trauma itself actually lies in what wasn't there. the hug that was missing when you were scared. the apology that never came.

grief is love, searching for a new home, and love this big, was never meant to disappear quietly. it can start before loss reaches finality, when we feel the goodbye, and lose pieces while they are still here, when our nervous system braces for impact, for a future we cannot yet bear. grief is anger, at what was taken too soon, and the silence left behind, a desperation, an ache, a yearning, confusion for how the world keeps turning, grief is numbness, a shutdown to survive,

sometimes, grief doesn't arrive in tears, or rage, collapsed aches, embodied sobs, sometimes it comes as stillness, numb, surreal. a quiet fog that settles over everything. like the world keeps turning, but you don't. you go through the motions, go to work, wash the dishes, but your body is somewhere else, trapped in a moment that hasn't finished happening, you hear the words, they're final, they matter, though they float outside of your body, refusing to land, the news hasn'

to know that beneath the statistics are real people, real hearts, real pain, and minds that fought to stay, real stories that were never meant to end this way. to invite compassion for what we cannot fully know, and gentleness for stories not our own. for suicide is not selfish, it is death by depression. the final symptom, a final collapse, and an ache to silence pain. and those who are suicidal deserve more than silence, more than guilt. more than shame. to feel their own l

to sit with grief, is to sit with pain. a longing, a yearning, homesick for a place that is no longer there, a desperation to fix, to make it feel better, to ease the quiet ache that screams so loud, for grief is love, searching for a new home. still reaching for where it once belonged, though grief can not be fixed, it only asks that we stay- to stay with our pain, to stay with what hurts, to stay tenderly consumed with our love, to trust that our ache speaks to how deeply w

over the past twenty four hours there has been a hurt and a heaviness, moving through hearts, and through nervous systems, following the violence and terror directed toward the Jewish community here in Sydney. for some, this pain is immediate and personal. for others, it may be quieter, and still heavy. a sense of unease, grief, numbness, anger, arriving through witnessing, imagining, remembering, and caring. a sense that the world has shifted, and our shared sense of safety