Grief made me experience conflicting emotions. Am I normal?

Grief affects so many things – including your emotions. Are you normal if you’re feeling a range of different things at once?

Feeling conflicting emotions is #perfectlynormal in grief.

You can miss your person with every cell in your body and also be angry at them for being gone. You can be having a wonderful day and still be sad. You can feel lonely and wish people would check on you while also not want to speak to anyone. Emotions do not cancel each other out. And feeling all sorts of different things at once is part of grief. It’s part of being human.

How about you? How have you experienced mixed or conflicting emotions? 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/