Grief makes me exhausted. Am I normal?
Grief affects so many things. What’s happened to your energy levels? Are you normal if you feel exhausted all the time?
Always feeling exhausted is #perfectlynormal in grief.
Of course you’re exhausted, your body and your mind are doing the best they can to function and survive under very severe circumstances. Grief affects appetite, digestion, blood pressure, heart rate, respiration, muscle fatigue, and sleep–basically everything. If it’s in the body, grief affects it. In addition to physical effects, cognitive changes, memory loss, confusion, and shortened attention span are all common in early grief (remember, define early for yourself).
How about you? Have you experienced physical and/or mental exhaustion since your loss? 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.
Want to share something with project #perfectlynormal?
Contribute here.
Submissions are anonymous. Share as many things as you like.
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/
