Grief made me feel confused and overwhelmed by simple tasks. Am I normal?

Grief affects so many things. What’s happened to your ability to complete simple tasks? Are you normal if you now feel confused and overwhelmed by things that used to be easy?

Feeling confused and overwhelmed by simple tasks is #perfectlynormal in grief.

Grief rearranges your mind. It makes even the simplest things hard to follow. It makes once-familiar things feel arbitrary or confusing. I remember standing in the checkout line at the grocery store completely confused by the money in my hand. I’d lost the ability to count. Whether it lasts a moment or feels interminable, your confusion is normal. It does tend to ebb and flow, in relation to other stressors in your life, emotionally heavy tasks you have to complete, and how well you’re eating and sleeping.

How about you? What are some things that used to be easy for you to do that now confuse or overwhelm you? 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/