“I’m Grieving During the Coronavirus Pandemic. You May Be, Too.”

Some behind the scenes news: I’ve just started hitting media pitches hard in the last couple of weeks. Everyone wants to talk about grief and I really need them to talk about it in ways that normalize grief, rather than demonize it. It feels massively important.

Being allowed to tell the truth is crucial. Allowing what is hard to BE hard. Acknowledgement matters. Helping people practice what our community already knows is what will make grief – individual and collective – easier to bear. Won’t fix it, but it will change it.

RO Kwon’s article is out in the NYT today. Last week, we spent an hour on the phone talking grief, anxiety, loneliness, and acknowledgment. Her final essay is glorious.

From the article:

“I wasn’t, though, nor am I now. Coronavirus grief is already a vast, monstrous grief, its reach and breadth expanding daily. It’s also a collective grief, a worldwide loss that — physically isolated though many of us have to be — a lot of other people are, in one way or another, also mourning. I hope, in this extraordinarily difficult time, to be better than I’ve been at letting myself mourn. I’ll start at the beginning: This is hard. I hurt. If you’re hurting, too, you’re not alone.”

Click here to read the entire article at The New York Times.

(PS: You can get free NYT access right now even if you’ve hit your article limit, They’ve changed their rules about subscriptions.)

Now, as always, the very best place I know to connect YOU with other grieving folks is inside the Writing Your Grief community. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, there is always someone there: when you feel invisible inside your grief, these folks see you. When your friends have their own sh*t to deal with and you can’t lean on them, your WYG family is there. I mean it folks, this community is unlike any other place – online or IRL. The April session is open now and we’ve got room for you. Follow this link to join us, and pass it on.