Grief made me forget where I parked. Am I normal?

Grief affects so many things – including your ability to remember where you parked your car. Has this happened to you?

Forgetting where you parked is #perfectlynormal in grief.

So is forgetting what color your car is, leaving your keys in the freezer, or putting frozen food in the dishwasher when you get home from the store. There’s a clumsy forgetfulness, or absentmindedness, that often comes with grief. It’s as if remembering all those little details are “extra” expenses, and your mind can’t afford them. Your mind can only retain so many things, so it simply drops what is not necessary for survival. It’s like triage in the mind.

How about you? What have you forgotten, misplaced, or gotten confused about? 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/