grief made me unable to read. Am I normal?

Grief affects so many things – including your ability to read. Has this happened to you?

Losing your ability to read is #perfectlynormal in grief.

This comes up regularly on @refugeingrief, but it’s so distressing and so common that it bears repeating. No matter how much of a book person you were before your loss, your capacity to read has most likely been impacted by grief. Some people have better luck with audiobooks. But for others, comprehension and/or attention span are so impacted that listening to books doesn’t work either. If you’re grieving this secondary loss of your reading ability, know that, in most cases, it is transitory. It just takes longer than you might think regain (or rebuild) your reader’s mind.

How about you? How has grief affected your ability to read? 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/