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If you can't cry

Everyone around you is weeping and you feel like cardboard. Numbness is a nervous system protecting you, not proof you loved them less.

Everyone around you is crying and you feel like cardboard. Dry-eyed at the funeral, oddly efficient at the wake, watching yourself from about a meter behind your own head. And the terrible whisper starts: does this mean I didn't love them enough?

No. Numbness is a nervous system doing triage. When a loss is too big to feel all at once, the body pulls a fuse - it lets the feeling in on a delay, in installments, when there's capacity. That flat, glassy, watching-a-film-of-your-life feeling is protection, not absence of love. Some of the deepest grief walks around for months looking calm.

Tears aren't the unit grief is measured in anyway. Some people cry at adverts and not at funerals. Some grieve in doing - the paperwork, the garden, the endless small tasks. Some go quiet for a year and weep at year two, when it's finally safe. The feeling usually arrives once the emergency is over; be gentle with yourself when it does.

You don't have to perform grief for anyone watching, and you don't have to produce it on demand for yourself. Loving them was never a faucet. It doesn't become one now.

Write with this - a prompt from the journal

Where does it sit in your body today - throat, chest, shoulders, everywhere, nowhere?

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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.