I miss the intensity of early grief. Am I normal?

Grief affects so many things. Are you normal if you find yourself missing the intensity of early grief?

Missing the intensity of early grief is #perfectlynormal in grief.

Grief doesn’t go away, but it does get different over time. Losing that intensity can feel like losing your person all over again. It’s one of the reasons I recommend journaling or taking the Writing Your Grief course, because writing creates an anchor to your feelings that you can access no matter how life changes. Because life will shift and change. That’s what it does. Life will shift away from the early days, and all their intensity. Not because you failed to keep them close, but because they are days, and days will pass. And missing those days is normal.

How about you? Depending on where you are in your grief, do you ever miss the intensity of the early period or consider feeling differently than you do now? 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/