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Read · grief and your body

Grief lives in the body

Why your chest hurts, why food tastes like nothing, why you're exhausted after sleeping ten hours. It's not just you.

Your chest aches. Food tastes like packaging. You slept ten hours and woke exhausted, or you haven't really slept in a month. You keep getting colds. You put your keys in the fridge. None of this means you're losing your mind - it means grief is not a feeling. It's a full-body event.

Your body is running an enormous, invisible program: scanning for someone who isn't coming back, bracing for a blow that already landed. That costs energy the way a fever costs energy. The exhaustion is real. The fog - "grief brain," the lost words, the missed exits - is real. The heavy limbs are real.

So feed the animal you live in, on the days you can: water, something warm, ten minutes of daylight on your face. Not as self-improvement. As maintenance for a body doing heavy labor.

And one honest caveat, said plainly because we're not doctors and don't play them here: chest pain, or symptoms that frighten you, deserve a real doctor's eyes. Grief explains a lot. Don't let it explain away everything.

Written from lived grief, not from a clinic - this whole place is peer support, not therapy. If today is heavier than a page can help with, the support lines have humans on them, at every hour.