4 Comments
User's avatar
Nessie's avatar

Thank you for saying all of this! 🙏

“The grief version of this calculation is especially complicated because the performance is expected to change over time in ways that don’t always match the reality. In the early weeks, people expect you to be not fine, and there’s some permission to say so. Within months, the permission starts to expire. At some point, certainly by a year, you’re supposed to be “over it” or moving forward, at the very least. By five years, the expectation of fine is so thoroughly installed in the people around you that saying otherwise feels like a social violation, like you’re asking for something the interaction wasn’t designed to provide.

The whole model is based on the fallacy that grief is linear and that the goal of grieving is to eventually not grieve.”

🎯🎯

Jerry's avatar

Care

Janie Braverman's avatar

Yes. This:

The grief version of this calculation is especially complicated because the performance is expected to change over time in ways that don’t always match the reality. In the early weeks, people expect you to be not fine, and there’s some permission to say so. Within months, the permission starts to expire. At some point, certainly by a year, you’re supposed to be “over it” or moving forward, at the very least.

Janie Braverman's avatar

And this:

I’m evasive because I don’t have the energy for a mini lesson on how grief works in the wild as opposed to the cleanliness of the mind, and I refuse to hand my grief over as evidence in an argument I never agreed to have.