Grief isn't simply felt. Grief is lived.

The hardest part about grief is that it is all consuming. It touches every aspect of your life whether you want it there or not, it interjects itself into every situation whether it was invited in or not. Things you once considered trivial or inconsequential suddenly hold new meaning for you. There will be times when something completely innocuous has the ability to stop you in your tracks and leave you overwhelmed with emotion, unable to breathe and at a complete loss. It could be a scent, a sound, someone's laughter, the way the sun hits a rooftop- anything.

And let's be honest here, for many of us grief is centered around a loss. For most of you reading this, you're young and so I hope this is irrelevant. But at the same time consider things like break-ups, broken trusts, broken relationships, and broken hearts. All of those cause us to grieve. For others it could be the loss of a job, a house, perhaps a death of someone close. Consider lost opportunities. Things we had the chance to do and something happened so that we couldn't. We grieve for lost moments. In some way or another I think most of us have experienced the pain of a loss and thus the grief that follows.

And those emotions that follow? They're hard. Grief doesn't fit itself into this small compartment of being sad and missing whatever was lost. Grief is so much more- anger, confusion, heartache, feelings of betrayal and inadequacy, confusion, the all encompassing question of why? All of these and more, emotions we can't name, but we know we feel all rolled into one heavy mass that sits on your chest and crushes your heart and makes it hard to breathe.

I don't think grief is something that we ever get over, but rather something we work into the daily fabric of our lives. This doesn't mean that we will always be sad, that we will always be angry, that we will always find that these emotions overwhelm and overpower us. I think it simply means that there will be a part of us that will always feel that loss. And even that's not a bad thing. Because maybe feeling that loss is in laughing about a great memory. Maybe in feeling that loss you're remembering a friend. Maybe in feeling that loss you're remembering why the relationship didn't work and setting yourself up for something better.

So while I don't know that grief ever truly leaves us, I know that it changes and eases and fades. It becomes softer than this raw emotion. It won't always be this painful though there may be parts that will always hurt. The grief becomes manageable, the hardest part is just having the patience to endure it until it does. So it's okay to break down and cry (holla at all the times I've found myself sobbing in the shower) because that's part of the healing process. So what if it means that you find yourself embarrassingly sobbing flat on your back in the middle of the park when 5 minutes before you were perfectly fine on a run? (...yep that happened this week too). Sometimes the emotions are too much to handle and so we need an outlet. So we lose it in the middle of doing something innocuous. But then we pick ourselves back up, brush off the leaves and dirt and tears and hurt, and keep moving forward. We don't stop running. We don't give up in the middle of our shower. We take 5 minutes (or twenty) to lose it completely and just immerse ourselves in our grief so that way we can let it fade. That way we can work it more something more manageable and incorporate it into our lives.

So maybe grief doesn't leave us, but maybe that's not a bad thing. Because I think that grief has the power to change us. And change us for the better if we let it. And the how isn't always clear and maybe to us it's never clear, but I think that in some way it touches us and has the power to make us better. Better listeners. Better lovers. Better somethings. Even if we don't know it right now.