Grief made me resent other people’s celebrations. Am I normal?

Grief affects so many things – including your reaction to other people’s achievements. Are you normal if other people’s celebrations now upset you?

Resenting other people’s milestones and celebrations is #perfectlynormal in grief.

It’s hard enough watching people go about their daily lives as though everything is normal. Watching people celebrate things – birthdays, births, graduations, weddings, holidays, you name it – that you or your person will never experience, that you’ll never get to experience with them… It hurts and it sucks. One thing that helps is sharing your own stories about how such things are hard on you, how they’ve changed since your loss. It’s a big reason this community exists, in order to acknowledge and support each other.

How about you? How do you feel when people around you are celebrating or marking different occasions? 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/