Grief made me lose my train of thought. Am I normal?

Grief affects so many things – including your ability to remember what you were talking about in the middle of a conversation. Are you normal if you lose your train of thought while talking to someone or simply thinking about something?

Losing your train of thought in the middle of a conversation is #perfectlynormal in grief.

No matter how your short-term memory worked before your loss, it has likely changed in your grief. Forgetting names, misplacing things, missing appointments, losing your train of thought, not being able to remember if you took your medication–all normal. This is another of grief’s physical side effects that does seem to consistently improve over time. As you live further from the event of your loss, your mind will make more space for memory.

How about you? Have you lost your train of thought while talking with someone or simply while thinking your thoughts? The more we talk about this stuff, the more we tell the truth about what grief is really like, the more people realize they’re not alone.

Grief is hard. It impacts every aspect of life, big and small. There are so many things grieving people experience, things they do or don’t do, that they (or the outside world) might think are unusual or weird, but are actually perfectly normal. You aren’t weird. You’re grieving.

The problem is, people often don’t realize they’re normal until they discover they aren’t alone in feeling a certain way or doing a particular thing. And feeling alone makes grief even harder than it already is.

Because it’s such a relief to find out we’re not alone, we’re creating a series of posts acknowledging as many of those things as we can, one #perfectlynormal thing at a time.

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These posts were created using personal contributions people just like you and from our awesome Grief Revolution patrons. My patrons get to see everything we create before anyone else, suggest topics to cover in future projects, participate in live Q&A sessions, and more. Join the Grief Revolution at patreon.com/megandevine/