You Do Not Have to Be Okay to Be Here
GRIEF AND HEALING
Somewhere along the way, most of us were handed a quiet rule. Be strong. Hold it together. Do not fall apart where people can see. We learned it young, carried it into jobs and marriages and hard nights, and for the most part, it kept the machinery running.
Then grief walked in, and grief does not care about that rule.
If you are early in a loss, you may already be worn out by a single word you keep repeating. Fine. "I'm fine." You say it to the neighbor, the coworker, the cousin who calls to check on you. You say it because it is shorter than the truth, and because the truth would take the whole afternoon and leave you both undone at the kitchen table. So you say, ‘Fine,’ and you manage the smile, and then you go sit in the car a minute before you can drive.
Here is what you may need to hear, plainly. You do not have to be okay to be here. Not on this page, not in this season, not in front of the people who love you.
Being not okay is not the same as being broken. It is not a sign that you are failing at grief, or falling behind some schedule the world seems to keep for other people's sorrow. There is no schedule. There is no gold star for the one who stops crying first. Grief is not a test you pass. It is a country you are learning to live in, one strange day at a time.
So let me say some things out loud that you may need permission to feel.
You are allowed to be angry. At the illness, at what happened, at the doctors, at yourself, at God, at the friend who said the wrong thing with the kindest heart. Anger is not the opposite of love. Sometimes it is love with nowhere to go.
You are allowed to not want to pray. If the words have dried up, if the ceiling feels like it is all that answers you right now, that is not the end of your faith. Faith has survived silence before. It can survive yours.
You are allowed to laugh. If something funny slips past your guard and a real laugh comes out, you have not betrayed anyone. You have not proven you are over it. You have only proven you are still alive, and being alive is not a crime against the one you lost.
You are allowed to forget for an hour. To get lost in a task, a show, a conversation, and then feel the loss come rushing back when you remember. That rushing back is not punishment for the forgetting. It is just grief, doing what grief does.
And you are allowed to come apart at the smallest thing. A song in the grocery store. A voicemail you cannot bring yourself to delete. The way the light falls in a room at the hour they used to come home. The big days are hard, but it is often the small, ambushing ones that bring us to our knees.
None of that means you are doing this wrong.
I will tell you something that took me a long time to trust. You can be a complete mess and still be healing. The two are not enemies. Healing is not the absence of pain. It is what slowly grows up alongside the pain, quiet and stubborn, like green pushing through a crack in the concrete. You do not have to feel it yet for it to be true.
If there is one small thing to try, maybe it is this. Find one person, just one, and let yourself be honest with them. Not the whole world. Not the ones who need you to perform your okayness so they can feel better. One safe person who can hear "I'm not okay" without rushing to fix you. Say it to them. Then let it be said.
And if you do not have that person yet, then let this page be the place you do not have to pretend. You can put the word fine down here. You can set down the smile. You can arrive with your grief still written all over your face.
You do not have to be okay to be here.
You only have to be here.
That is enough for today.
"Come as you are, not as you think you should be. The heart does not heal by pretending it is whole. It heals by being allowed to be exactly where it is." Haynes
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