There was something else that was like intermingled with all the griefs that were being shared.
It was a frustration and despair and a fatigue that there was yet another thing to grieve,
that there were no breaks to be found between losses and that as life continued to unfold,
we as a society, as a collective, are very definitely looking at enduring many, many,
many years of unpredictable, unavoidable grief down the road. In other words, and it hit me
like a lightning bolt, people were grieving about grieving. And in that moment, it was like,
is there a word for that? Is there a thing that exists to describe grieving about grieving?
It could not find any words or definitions or articles about grieving the grief experience
itself. And so I created MetaGreef.
Hi there, grieve growers, and welcome back to Grief Grower. I am so honored to be spending time here
with you today. If you have been growing alongside me in my work for a while, welcome back.
And if you are new to me in my work, hello. My name is Shelby for Scythia. I'm a Grief Coach,
a two-time soon-to-be, three-time author, and the founder of Life After Loss Academy,
which is an online program that has helped dozens of grieving people stop feeling lost, stuck,
heartbroken, and overwhelmed, and start building lives that they genuinely love from the lives
that loss force them to live. This of course not only includes death-related losses, which is what
most people think of when they think about grief, but also losses like divorce and breakup,
major diagnosis, and as you will hear on the show today, the losses of the world and oftentimes
grieving about grieving. Here on Grief Grower, we believe that grief is not something that we get over.
It is something that we grow with and alongside, and that when we stop treating grief less like a
problem to be solved, and more like an invitation to live more deeply, we create meaningful lives that
are rich with the memories that we carry, the struggles that we faced, and the precious
awareness of what it means to be right here right now. And as I hinted in the introduction to the
show, today I want to share something that I invented with you, a new word, a new term for grief.
It has sprung up for me out of not necessarily thin air, but after many months of thinking about it
and pondering it, and then kind of this one moment in time activated, like this needs to be a thing,
this needs to be a word in grief world right now. So the word, the term that I have invented,
is called metagreif, and it essentially means to me, and we can build this definition together.
I hope you'll write me and tell me what you think of this grieving about grieving. There are things like
meta-analysis, which is an analysis of analyses. There's meta-science, which is the science about science.
And so to experience metagreif is to experience grief about the grief experience itself. And so I'm
calling this episode something akin to what is metagreif, navigating things like grief fatigue,
grief exhaustion, and the toll of ongoing tragedy. And I'll tell you the story of where this came from.
I first started thinking about this term, or originated this term in January of this year,
which as soon as we had turned a new year, collectively, the news of the fires in Los Angeles here
in the United States broke out everywhere, it was breaking news, and the fires and news about them,
and people grieving their homes and their possessions and their families and their jobs,
and their communities and their routines was just flooding my feed on threads, which is one of the
apps I spend quite a bit of time on. It's where I get my news these days. I'm calling it nice Twitter.
It's met as version of Twitter. There are mean people there for sure, but it seems a little bit
more vulnerable and honest than Twitter currently is, and a place where I enjoy getting back to some
of my roots of just sharing written thoughts, which is a lot of where I started doing grief work,
with sharing written thoughts without photos, without pictures on Facebook. And so threads is where
I spend a lot of my time, and I distinctly remember feeling like we were turning the corner from 2024
to 2025, and there's kind of always this collective hope for a fresh start or a new year that will
somehow, even if it's just hope, be a little bit less griefy than the one that came before it,
but tragedy burst in right away with this overwhelm and this great devastation. And as I was reading
people's thoughts and experiences on threads, there was something else that was like intermingled
with all the griefs that were being shared. It was a frustration and despair and a fatigue that
there was yet another thing to grieve, that there were no breaks to be found between losses and that
as life continued to unfold, we as a society, as a collective, are very definitely looking at
enduring many, many, many years of unpredictable, unavoidable grief down the road. In other words,
and it hit me like a lightning bolt, people were grieving about grieving. And in that moment as I
was scrolling my threads feed, I was like, is there a word for that? Is there a thing that exists
to describe grieving about grieving? And so I googled grieving about grief, but when I did, I got this
list of articles, sort of the general kind that you think of after the death of a loved one, or when
you're writing a research paper about the difference between grief and bereavement, and we already
did a grief-for-episode on that, it's episode four, if you want to go back and listen, to the difference
between grief, loss, bereavement, and mourning, because they are all different words. But I could not
find any words or definitions or articles about grieving the grief experience itself. And so I created
Metagreif, it is a noun, and it is the grief you feel about the fact that you're grieving,
the experience of grief itself being a source of sorrow. And set another way, Metagreif is an invisible
load that adds another layer, often an unspoken layer, to an already heavy grief experience, and it
is something that so, so many of us carry without even realizing it. It is something that originates in
living inside of what we know to be an endless cycle of loss and trauma and heartbreak. Both in our
personal lives, we know that we're going to lose people or things or dreams or ideas in our life,
and we also will experience greater collective losses as a society, as a world. It is grief about the
ongoing nature of grief itself and a deep internal knowing that things like death and poverty and violence
and oppression and disaster will always be a part of living and being a human on planet earth.
And becoming aware of Metagreif looks like recognizing that you are not only mourning your loss,
but you are also mourning the fact that you have to grieve in the first place. It is the distress or
despair or resignation that comes from knowing that grief is going to be with you for the long haul
and that you will keep encountering grief even if you are not ready or willing to. I remember very
distinctly a student in life after a loss academy described way back in 2020. She's like, I'm not
necessarily mad about the fact that I'm grieving. I'm mad about this sense that it feels like grief
was forced upon me. I did not choose this path. Grief is a full-time job. It's a full-time project.
I'm having to expend energy that I already didn't have on something that I didn't ask to happen.
And so now I am grieving, but I'm also grieving about the fact that I have to grieve, that I must,
that it is an unavoidable part of being human and of processing all of my emotions about all
the people that I have lost. And if this sounds anything like you or if anything I've described
about the concept of Metagreif, sounds like things you have been thinking about. I hope that you'll
sort of ride along with me in this episode as I do my best to wrap words around this experience.
And then absolutely if this resonates with you or if you have more to add, this is not the first time
I want to be talking about Metagreif. I do hope you will pop into the show notes of this episode
and contact me and reach out with your thoughts on the concept of Metagreif. So kind of to even
keep going and drilling down into what exactly it means to be experiencing Metagreif. See if any of
these things sound familiar to you. Because in trying to pin down exactly what do I mean when I say
Metagreif or grieving about grieving, I've started to gather sentiments from students in life after
law's academy, from friends, family co-workers, fellow grief professionals, and of course the original
inspiration for this term, strangers expressing their grief on social media. So see if one or more of
these sort of bullet point listicles resonates with you. One, you are overwhelmed by the idea of
grief that it never fully ends and has the potential to resurge again when you least expect it.
Two, you are longing for the innocence and ease of a world before loss and sometimes wish you could
go back in time to an age where you did not know about or understand grief. Pre-greif nostalgia is
what I'm calling this concept. Number three, you dread the future, not necessarily because of what
might happen, although that can be dread inducing in and of itself, but because you know no matter what
the losses are, there is always more grief waiting for you somewhere in the future. Four, you were
exhausted by the unending process of grieving, resent the work it takes to process, and wish you could
hit pause, but you know that ignoring your grief only makes things worse. And five, you feel helpless
and heartbroken witnessing world events. Now除 disasters, wars, political strife, violence, climate
change, oppression, everything that reminds you of the fragility of life and the endless reasons
each and every one of us has to mourn. And kind of from what I've seen and what I've gathered
from everywhere I have access to and can hold in this present moment, knowing that I am human,
just like everybody else, these five things form the heart and the essence of metagreif. Metagreif
is not necessarily about the loss itself. It's not necessarily someone I love died or I got a
divorce or a major diagnosis changed my life or my home is on fire. It is more about how you feel
about having to grieve the loss in the first place. It is the weight of knowing that grief is hard
wired inescapably into the human experience and then it does not have an end point. And if everything
I'm saying feels like a lot to you, that's because it is. And metagreif is something just like so many
other aspects of grief that has a ton, a ton of layers. And it shows up differently for different
people, but here's some common ways I have seen it show up. One of the biggest ones is grieving loss
of innocence. And as I mentioned before, this is a concept I'm calling pre-grey from nostalgia. It is
this ache or this wish or this desire or this longing, like a very physical felt in your chest
emotion to go back to a time when you did not even know when grief was. Some of us do not have the luxury
of not knowing grief. Some of us are born into grief or oppression or violence or strife. Some of us
have the luxury or the privilege of having and remembering life pre-moss or knowing that bad things
happened somewhere out there, but they had not touched us yet. And so there's this sense of I wish
I could go back there. And even if you were a person who did not have that privilege and were born
into a life where grief was inherently part of your story, you may long for a kind of like an alternative
timeline, a pre-grey from nostalgia of a life that could have been had you not been born into griefy
or traumatic circumstances. This can also look like looking around at people who have not yet
experienced profound loss and feeling envy or jealousy or anger towards them. And this ability that
they have to live without the shadow or the awareness of grief as their constant companion. And you
might also be pissed at people who know that grief exists and yet willingly ignore it. These are
people who are ignorance as bliss types or look on the bright side toxic positivity types.
I have to say on many past podcast episodes both on my own shows and others where I've been
interviewed, I often refer to griefs appearance in our lives as a perspective shifting event. It is a
worldview changing event. Once you see grief or experience grief, you can't unsee or unexperience it.
Once you know you can't unknow. And in life after a loss academy, I often describe living with grief as
having a pair of grief glasses permanently super glued to your face. You can no longer not see
through the lens of grief. I know that's a double negative. But in other words, once grief first
makes an appearance in your life, you never know a life without grief. Again, you start to see it
not just in your life, but in the lives of people surrounding you or in movies or music or television
or media or radio. You start to just notice grief themes everywhere and connect with grief
in lots of different ways. On one hand, that can make you extraordinarily compassionate and empathetic
and human. And on another hand, it can feel very much as if grief is an inescapable force or presence.
And one big part of metagreep is mourning this loss of the life before the grief goggles or the
grief glasses, the version of you that had no idea how heavy and lifelong the experience of grief is.
Okay, another way that metagreep can can manifest for people is dreading future losses. Even when
you're not in the devastating early days of grief, you might notice yourself bracing for or like
holding your breath for the next loss, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Metagreep can appear as
anticipatory grief. The knowledge that grief isn't a one-time event, but something you face again
and again in different forms and iterations and kind of preparing for the next loss. So for instance,
you might be grieving the death of a loved one right now, but you know that others you love will die
in the future. You may dread the day a beloved pet dies, the day you're forced to leave a job you
love or can no longer do it physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. The day you or a loved one
receives a life-changing diagnosis that alters how you see or perceive of your health or your body
forever. You might dread the day you and a partner one day separate or the day that your community
or your country faces a collective tragedy or disaster. The metagreep, the grief about grief
of anticipating future losses is exhausting. I cannot convey to you if you have this, you already know
it how exhausting it is because it's something that takes you out of the present moment and suspends
you in this constant state of tension and holding your breath and waiting for the other shoe to drop,
thinking about and considering what might come next. And while it's factually true that you'll face
more losses, the lived experience of prepping for future losses is a grief about grief that's
so, so many of us feel it's a fear that many of us have, but it is not often talked about. And I will
say because you've lived through it before, you know intimately just how deep and destabilizing
loss can be. So the anticipation you feel is not abstract panic. You are not freaking out over
nothing. You are not waiting for that shoe to drop for no reason. It is grounded in your past experience.
So I want to validate that dreading future losses is a very normal part of grieving about grief.
It is not something that's irrational or crazy or overblown. You know personally from intimate
lived experience that more losses can happen. And that is something that we are not talking about
that we really need to be. And this is why so much I'm trying to wrap this phrase or this term of
metagreaf grieving about grieving around this experience. One of the other ways that metagreaf can
manifest is feeling stuck in a cycle of grief. And this can often happen when one loss seems to
follow another loss or when they're all like piled on top of each other. It is extraordinarily easy
to feel like you're trapped in this never ending cycle of grief. And this flavor of metagreaf
grieving about grieving is about the weariness of grieving itself. It's this desire to like move forward
or get out of the mud of grief. But to feel like grief keeps pulling you back or like snap back
like a rubber band. And one of my students in life after a loss academy, I'll never forget this.
She and I began calling this feeling grief debt. And it's this sense that we will always owe some
form of emotional physical mental or spiritual processing time to grief. We are in debt to the
experience of grief. It is a feeling that stacks up and compounds with each new loss because more
loss equals more grief to process. And it can feel like, especially if you have a bunch of losses
altogether, that you're in a never ending game of catch up with grief. And the example I can give
you of this from my own life is my best friend dying from COVID in 2022. While the larger world was
still reeling from the early years of the pandemic and the social and political upheaval that came
with that. So those two things were happening in tandem. And then one month after she died, I was
diagnosed with a chronic illness that changed my life and began a brand new grieving process for
the health and the body and frankly the hair that I used to have. I had barely started to
grieve my best friend. I was less than 30 days in to her death and was caught up in the grief of
the United States and the larger world when this fresh new loss arrived. And it was like watching
my grief bank balance, my metaphorical bank balance dipped from the negative hundreds of thousands
into the negative millions. And there was nothing that I could do to prevent it. It was like, oh my gosh,
I have even more grief to catch up on even more than was already on my plate. That's another way
that metagreif can manifest. And so if you are feeling this right now, you are absolutely not alone.
The fourth way that metagreif can often manifest and I kind of refer to this in the last one is
morning on behalf of the world. And this is one that so so many client students, friends, people in my
life who are neurodivergent or highly sensitive or empathetic or compassionate or just kind of
natural caregivers. This is one that they feel very, very deeply because the world feels really
heavy right now. More climate disasters, violence, systemic oppression, all of this adds to the
personal griefs and losses that we all carry and metagreif one way it can look is morning for
people that you've never met and morning for places that you've never been simply because you notice
and feel the weight of the world suffering. And of course, our 24 hour news cycle, which gets more
views and clicks on negative heavy air quotes stories, then it does on positive ones only intensifies
this feeling of being stuck in a continuous cycle of loss and grieving on behalf of the world.
Whether you are watching children be separated from their parents at the border or hearing about
families being torn apart or being lost by violence and more zones or witnessing the overturning
of policies designed to protect marginalized people or keeping tabs on the latest hurricane or
tornado or flood or fire, it is a lot, it is a lot, a lot, a lot on every level to contend with.
And wrapped up in all of this can often be a belief that you have no right to grieve your personal
losses when there is so much going on in the world. It is the terrible. You better finish everything
on your plate because there are children starving in Africa. You cannot suffer because people are
suffering worse and that your individual grief has no place among the collective and nothing can
be further from the truth. The other side of that is you may grieve that you need to tune out the
pain of the world in order to tend to your own personal pain. You may have dropped off the face of
the earth when it comes to keeping up with the news. You may feel as if you have no idea what's going
on in the world because the crisis in your home in your own grief experience is so painful and so
overwhelming in either way, whether you're thinking I have no right to complain about my suffering
because everybody else has it so much worse or I've tuned out the world suffering because mine is
so great. It all feels like grieving about grieving. I am grieving the fact that I have to even make
this choice. It is a recognition that you are just one human being and it is impossible to hold all
of these griefs together in one person all at once. The next one I want to talk about, a way that
metagreaf manifests is one that I see a lot especially when it comes to social issues, economic issues,
climate issues, political issues. And this is the grief that some or all of this loss and suffering
could have been prevented. And this is one that we do not have language for, which is why I'm really
trying to get this language of metagreaf out there because this specific type of metagreaf
that many, many, many people seem to feel has this tinge of if only. It's a belief that if something
had gone differently, then our grief would not be so big or we would not have to grieve something
at all. It is the knowledge that in some cases human decisions led to a very, very real and felt
increase in pain and suffering and heartache and grief. This can be applied to personal losses,
such as a suffering-filled decline of a loved one, a divorce process that went on way too long,
a diagnosis that you got late in life and you feel like I missed out on so much life. It did not have
to be this way. I wish I'd gotten this diagnosis sooner or a delayed exit from a toxic friendship or
relationship or job. But it can also be applied to something like communal or world losses, such as
pandemic deaths, policy-related losses, things like immigration or reproductive rights,
also things like climate change or involvement in or ignoring of war. And regardless of whether
the loss is personal or communal, the lingering story is it didn't have to be this way. This didn't
have to be the path that we chose. There were other paths and choices that we could have taken,
that we could have made, ones with less suffering, this type of pain, this flavor of pain,
did not have to be our burden and yet here we are, you are grieving about the fact that you must
grieve the present reality as it is right now. And to be very clear, it is not regret.
Regret is, I chose wrong and I wish I could go back and choose again. This sense of this could have
gone differently is a profound sense of deep disappointment that if people or circumstances
usually ones that are outside of our control could have been different, could have acted differently,
done differently, responded sooner, then maybe everyone suffering could either be lessened or
would not exist at all. It is an imaginary sort of torture to say if only had had gone this way,
we would not be grieving this way, but it is also very grounded in reality that many, many times our
human decisions, whether on a personal or collective level or circumstances outside of our control,
if either of those things had gone differently than this grief may not have even presented itself
in the first place and that is a very specific kind of grieving about grief. The last one I want to
touch on, the final manifestation that I've uncovered about grief about grief is simply it's the
most obvious, it is grieving the grief journey itself because grief requires a hell of a lot from us,
it demands that we sit with discomfort and process complicated emotions and revisit memories
that feel more painful than comforting, met a grief grieving about grieving is the exhaustion of knowing
that grief is an inherent part of being human and that we must grieve in order to survive.
There is no shortcut through grief, there is no path around under
over through, there is no magic pill and there is no easy way out of the experience of grief,
and I will say many grief experts including myself, including all of us here on grief for every
single episode, we talk about the benefits of seeing grief as a long-term relationship,
there is another side to that point, the dark side, and that is if I see grief as a long-term
relationship I acknowledge that grief is never ending. So whether you're making plans or celebrating
a milestone or dealing with life's inconveniences or working towards your dreams, grief is a part of
the picture, and no matter how quote-unquote good you get at grief, you will always be grieving and
there will always be more to grieve and even joy comes with echoes and callbacks to loss,
people who aren't here to share things with you, the versions of yourself or the world that existed
before this experience of grief entered the picture. There are so so many griefs embedded in the
grief journey including this fact that grief never goes away, it is never ending, the reality that
society often demands you hide or suppress your grief in order to be quote-unquote a functioning
person, grieving the person that you really want to process your grief with whether they've died
or it's a breakup situation, and the inherent unpredictability of how grief shows up day to day.
Now grief for us, this is a lot, this is a lot of a lot of a lot, and I don't want to leave you on a
bummer note. I want to convey and introduce you to this new word I have invented for grief,
but as we come to the end of this episode, I want to offer some ways for how to cope with meta-grief,
grieving about grieving because it's hard, this is such a hard thing, and if you are recognizing
yourself all throughout this episode, then you know that my next step for you is going to be to
offer some ways to deal with it, process it, cope with it, work with it, and so the first one I want
to offer to you is is acknowledge it, out loud say I'm grieving about my grief, I'm experiencing
meta-grief, I am feeling grief over the fact that I am grieving, while it might feel strange to say
that it is a very powerful way to validate your emotions, and if you have someone you are grieving
with or alongside, friend, family member, coworker, neighbor, grief support professional,
consider acknowledging your meta-grief with them or sharing the concept of meta-grief with them
and say we're grieving about the fact that we are grieving, you might even laugh about it,
this can provide space and room for both validation and noticing oh we are not alone, we are all
grieving about grieving right now. The second thing that I want to offer you is to take breaks from
grief. I know I've said before that grieving people are grievous 24/7 and we are all in long-term
relationships with our grief and but and there is a big difference between actively engaging with
your grief, things like journaling, moving your body, crying, talking about it, and so on,
and allowing yourself to simply exist in the world as a grieving person. So as much as you can,
give yourself permission to take breaks from actively processing your grief, you do not have to be
doing grief work all the time. This is a huge pressure that I put on myself especially after
my mom's death as an order to get over my grief, I have to be doing grief work all the time and that
burden me out. That was really hard to do. So things like taking a break from your grief might look
like watching funny movies, spending time in nature, doing anything that brings you joy or
silliness or play or an escape from the experience of working through your grief 24/7. You do not have to
be immersed in that kind of heavy hard and hard work all the time in order to honor your losses or to
prove that you care about your loved one who died or even to heal. There is a lot of healing that can
happen from experiencing other things while you are also simply existing in the world as a grieving
person. And I will say if you have the time, money, and energy, you might even take a vacation or a
griefcation or a vacation that honors your grief to really step away from the experience of living
grief day to day or you might do like a social media sabbatical or a new sabbatical or something of
that nature to unplug as much as possible from things that feel like they're piling on grief,
to say what are some things I can do to pile off grief or to set grief on the back burner for a little
bit so I can play or rest or be creative or or spend time with things that nourish me.
The third thing I want to offer you for coping with metagreif is building a routine to your day
that is grief inclusive. So this looks like creating regular rituals that makes space for your
griefful also allowing you to live your life. Things like writing or meditation or yoga or going
on short walks. These are all things that can help you find the balance between
mourning and being immersed in despair and feeling like you are able to grow into the future.
One example that I will give I'll call back to my best friend's death is I regularly listen to
a podcast that we used to listen to together when she was alive. And while she's not here in person
or on planet earth to listen with me, in listening to this podcast and it's usually very funny,
it is not a deep or heavy podcast most of the time. I like to imagine in my head what she might say
in response to the hosts and picture her laughing with me at parts that I know she would find funny.
And it is one way that I fold my grief for her and my relationship to her into my regular routine.
And it is also a way I infuse my grief with like a bit of lightness. It's not all hard grief work.
It's not all EMDR trauma therapy. It is not all writing about how much I miss her or
talking about the way my heart aches with family and friends. That is part of it. But it is also
folding in things that remind me of her in funny or joyful or silly ways. And other things you
might do if that's not something that resonates with you is incorporating grief books or podcasts
like this one or online courses into your regular life. These resources can help you have more
language for talking about grief and also reassure you that you are not the only one on planet earth
who is noticing and bearing witness to the heaviness of the world. And one of the things I always
recommend in spots like this is if you are grieving the death of a loved one in addition to experiencing
metagreaf or grieving about grieving. My second book here grief your way is a very good place to start.
It is a short non religious daily devotional for a living life after a person you care about dies.
And it has teeny tiny little passages. I think they're all 250 words less. And they're written out by
the days of the year. You can start literally any time. You don't have to follow along January, February,
March, April and so on. You can skip around. You can play book roulette and flip open to any page
and just see what resonates with you. And there are kind of ping pong-sistered
passages. Some days are quotes and some days are exercise that you can do to move through and
cope with your grief. And it is a massive coping tool that is used in many places around the world.
Right now to help people feel like they have a small routine to devote to their grief and it
takes less than 10 minutes a day. For some people five minutes a day if you're a fast reader to read
the passage sort of absorb the message and then go on with your day. The fourth thing I want to
offer you for coping with metagreaf is finding community. Because the more I talk about it, the more I
realize that metagreaf is something a lot of people feel grieving. We are all grieving about grieving.
So seeking out spaces where you can connect with other people who understand whether it is support
groups, online forums, trusted friends is paramount. Of course this is where I'll put an
applug for life after loss academy. This is my community online, which is created intentionally
for all kinds of losses. I call them the 3Ds and more, death divorce diagnosis and more. Every single
week we are coming together as a group to chat about and honor both our personal losses, the things
that oftentimes brought us to the group, but also the ways that society and the world that we live
in are shaping our grief experience at the same time. So if you are interested in talking about
metagreaf with a group of compassionate and validating grievers, I hope you'll consider joining
us and you can find the link to do that in the show notes. The last one I want to offer you,
number five, when coping with metagreaf is to shift your perspective and this is easier set than done.
Grief, including metagreaf, is not something to conquer or get rid of. This is the core message
of the heart of grief. Grief is not something to get over. It is something we carry with us
through the rest of our lives. Seeing grief, not as something to hurry up and get over, but as a
constant sort of ebbing and flowing presence in your life can help you anticipate its presence,
build up a tolerance for it and perhaps even welcome its perspective in your life at times.
I tell students in life after a loss of academy clients I work with that with time, attention,
patience and practice, grief can begin to feel like less of a burden and more like a companion,
one that shapes you. Yes, absolutely grief has an influence on your life and the course of your life
in meaningful ways, but not one that necessarily hinders you or keeps you from living or is so
full of despair that you do not feel able to go on. There are many, many kinds of relationships
that we can have with grief and sometimes just seeing it through a slightly different lens can help us
not necessarily, you know, throw up in the doors and welcome to the party grief, but say,
okay, grief's in the room and I have tools and I have words and I have the ability to sit with it
and to tend to it in the way that it deserves and frankly in the way that I deserve.
The thing I want to close with at the end of the show today is that you are allowed to grieve about
grief. Metagreif or grieving about grieving is a natural and normal response to the complexities
of being a person on planet earth. It is more than okay to grieve about grieving, to feel tired of
carrying loss and to mourn the fact that grief is an inevitable part of life. The good news is that
you do not have to carry a metagreif all by yourself, whether you are grieving a personal loss or the
way to the world or both, there are tools and communities to help you navigate this invisible weight
of metagreif and to help you find the language for describing these specific flavors of grieving
about grief. So I would love to hear from you. Do you think that metagreif is an appropriate term
for grieving about grieving? Please get in touch through the link in the show notes and let me know
and of course if you would like to keep the conversation going, if you would like more intimate access
to me and to a community of wonderfully compassionate grievers, I hope you'll join us inside life
after loss academy, which is my online grief support course and community. Once again, every single
week we meet to talk about griefs, presents in our lives, I share tools for coping with it, and we also
talk about how we're finding stability and hope and purpose in a world that is grifeer and grifeer
by the day. And the replays of these conversations are available to watch anytime if you can attend live,
and in case you didn't hear it on past episodes of grief grower, discounted memberships are available
if you're marginalized or a financially stressed griever and you can learn more and join us
at the link in the show notes. Thank you so much for joining me today to explore this concept of
metagreif and I look forward to hearing what you think of this new term to describe what it means to
grieve about grieving. That's all for this episode of Grief Grower. Thank you so very much for joining me
today. If you're looking for grief support beyond this show, you can find free workshops, blog articles
in my signature, what's your grief support style quiz at shallbeforcitya.com/links. And if you'd like
to get support from me for your unique loss experience, do join us in life after loss academy, my
online course and community. As a student, I will walk you through my five step grief framework,
GRIEF for rebuilding after loss and you can get live coaching from me every single week to answer
your questions. Once again, replays are always available if you can't attend live and it's just
$33 a month to join or $22 a month if you're marginalized or financially stressed griever. If this
podcast felt validating, comforting, educational or otherwise helpful to you, please subscribe
and leave a review on Apple podcasts or Spotify. And be sure to share Grief Grower with a friend
because you never know what someone you love is going through or any of the griefs that they're
grieving about. Grief Grower is hosted by me, shallbeforcitya and the theme music is composed by Annie
Goldstein. Until next time, Grief Grower, I see you. I am so proud of you and the work that you're
doing in the world. And I love you. Because even through grief, we are growing.