Holding Grief & Flourishing Together

This week, grief has been my shadow. Not loud, not overwhelming—just there. Like a song playing faintly in the background, looping, waiting to be noticed. Settling into the spaces I thought I had cleared. Moving with me, beside me. Some weeks are like this.

I’ve built a life around flourishing—helping others thrive, finding my own balance, leaning into the work that makes me feel alive. But grief doesn’t care about that. It doesn’t care about progress or transformation. It doesn’t care that I have reshaped my world and my thinking. Some weeks, it just shows up and stays a while.

And I let it.

Because grief isn’t failure. It isn’t a step backward. It isn’t something to be fixed.

I am a fixer. I like to fix things. 

Some nights feel colder than others. Not in temperature, but in the space left behind. It hasn’t been for a long time.

Grief creates these gaps. It separates us, not just from people, but from versions of ourselves we thought were permanent. It forces us to let go of what was, even when every part of us still wants to hold on.

There is a version of me that existed before. A version who hadn’t yet learned what absence felt like, who moved through the world with a kind of certainty I no longer recognise. That version is gone now. In its place is someone who understands loss, who has had to rebuild, who has learned how to carry what can’t be put down.

Most days, I trust this newer version of myself. I know growth was necessary. But some days, I feel like a stranger in my own life, looking back at something I can never fully return to. And that ache—that quiet, persistent ache—is part of it.

And that’s okay.

Here’s something only a few people understand—grief rewires you.

It’s an invisible thread connecting those who have been through it. It sharpens your awareness. You see it in others, in the hesitation before they answer How are you? In the slight falter in their voice when certain memories surface. In the way they carry themselves, just a little more carefully than before.

But if you haven’t been through it, you don’t get it. Not really. And that’s okay.

Grief is a club you don’t sign up for. And once you’re in, you never really leave. You learn its language. You recognise its weight in others. You know what it means when someone says, It’s just been one of those weeks.

There’s a strange comfort in that. Knowing you’re not the only one. Even if most of the world moves on, even if people expect you to be fine, even if time dulls the edges—grief lingers. And the ones who know, know.

Time does something to grief. It doesn’t erase it, but it changes the way it sits.

At first, it feels like something sharp, something jagged, something that cuts whenever you try to touch it. You try to gather the pieces, to make sense of them, but they slip through your fingers.

Then one day, without realising when it happened, the edges aren’t quite as sharp. The pieces are still there, but they don’t wound the way they once did. Instead, they catch the light differently. They reflect, they refract, they become something else.

But they don’t disappear. Not entirely.

And maybe that’s the point.

I’ve always been a glass half full kind of person. I look for the positives, for what can be built from the ruins. But sometimes, that doesn’t help.

Grief doesn’t fit into optimism. You can’t reframe it into something neat. It just is. And I am learning that I have to sit with that. No matter what I read or say or pray I can’t out think it. Frustrating that. 

I don’t get to decide whether grief stays or goes. But I do get to decide whether I make space for it or keep pretending it’s not there.

My faith has helped—to a degree. There is something in knowing that grief isn’t the end of the story. That there is meaning beyond what we see.

I’m a spiritual person. I can’t help that.

Maybe that’s why I still believe grief and love are intertwined. That we only grieve deeply because we have loved deeply. That loss leaves an imprint, but it also leaves something behind.

I talk about flourishing. I live it. I believe in it. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have days when it feels like too much. When grief sits beside me, uninvited. When I feel the weight of everything I have left behind.

But maybe flourishing isn’t about eliminating grief. Maybe it’s about learning to carry it differently.

There are days when I stand in front of a room, talking about resilience and thriving, and grief sits quietly in my chest. It doesn’t ruin the moment. It doesn’t take away from flourishing. It’s just there, woven into the fabric of who I’ve become.

Because maybe that’s what flourishing really is. Not pretending we are untouched by loss, but learning to live with it. Learning to let grief walk beside us without letting it hold us back.

It means I am still here. Still moving. Still finding my way through.

Some weeks, grief will be louder than others. Some weeks, it will walk with me a little longer. And that’s okay. I don’t need to push it away. I don’t need to rush through it.

Because grief is not separate from flourishing. It is part of it.

And I am learning, again and again, how to hold both.

Normal programming will resume next week. 

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