For the grell of it…

Rough sketch of a grell, by Jaydot Sloane (2025)

I struggle with grief. This is, honestly, pretty common in America. I can’t speak for anywhere else, but I can pretty confidently say that my culture is not adept at navigating grief. We would rather hide it as impolite, a burden, a thing to ignore until it goes away.

I’m not just talking about the kind of grief when someone you love dies. Even small griefs, like breaking your favorite mug or getting cut off in traffic. All of lifes tiny tragedies and all of its large ones, and we’re taught to just suck it up. Because someone else might have it worse. Because it’s not that big a deal. Because we need to just get over it, without any instruction as to how we get over it. Figure it out, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and move on immediately.

Genuinely, the past decade of therapy has had this core running through it. How do I deal with grief. The depression I struggle with is not so different from your more mundane grief. It just doesn’t decay the way you would expect grief to decay, so instead of feeling better after some ice cream or a day outside or touching grass, I just spiral ever further into grief.

Learning how to sit with grief, how to look at it head on, directly confront and comfort my grief has been the singular most important skill I should have learned as a child but instead am learning as a very grown adult. My depressions is worse when I try to dismiss my grief, or just refuse to acknowledge it altogether. And yes, sometimes naming my grief makes me feel like I sound selfish or rude or silly, but above all those things, the grief is mine. It’s not a value judgement on me, it’s not a value judgement on whatever it is I am grieving. It just is, and so must I just be with it.

In the macro sense of building community, it’s not always going to be with people you like, but it will be with people that you can work with instead of against. So it goes in the micro, internal sense. I have to work with the feelings I have, not the ones I wish I had, and that requires grace and compassion and patience and love above all else. Room to breathe, and room to grieve.

xoxoxoxo,

J.