Journals can be a place in grief where nothing has to make sense.
Everything is allowed, which is my favorite part.
And and it just kind of like people putting their initials on trees or attaching
locks to bridges. It's it's like I was here.
I was working through something. I was working out something. I was I was living
through something. And that is really significant and really,
um, a firming and grounding and and kind of rooting you back into the earth when
you're grieving.
Hi there and welcome back to grief grower. My dear grief growers, I am so
delighted to be here with you today as always. If you have been growing alongside me
in my work for a while, welcome back. If you're new to me in my work, hello.
My name is Shelby Persitia. I am a grief coach, two time author and the founder of
Life After Loss Academy. And over the years since I've been doing this work,
I have had the joy and the honor of helping thousands of grieving people through
my books, through my podcasts, through my online courses, stop feeling stuck in
grief and build lives that they genuinely love from the lives that loss force them to live.
And when I say loss, I don't just mean death related loss because I think people
think grief and they think death and that is true. But we can also grieve so many
other things in our lives. And so all the work that I do also honors divorces,
breakups, major diagnoses, geographic moves, job losses and any other major
loss that changes your life. And here on the show, again, if you're new to this work,
we believe that grief is not something to get over. It is something that we grow
with and alongside for the rest of our lives. And when we stop treating grief,
like a problem to be solved or an illness to be treated and more like an
invitation to live more deeply, we can really build these rich and cohesive
lives that are meaningful to us or purposeful to us. Again, build lives that we
genuinely love even from the lives that loss forced us to live. Today on the show,
we're going to be talking about one of my all time favorite topics, which is
writing for grief, journaling about grief. This is something I did after my
mother's death in 2013. Although it took me a little bit of time to feel like I
could write again. I know reading is hard for a lot of grieving people.
Writing was hard for me as well. And figuring out what to write is often a
dilemma for grieving people. So this is sort of like a a listicle episode where
I'm going to give you in order seven different journaling prompts that you can
use if you are wanting to journal about your grief or your loss, but you don't
know where to start. You don't know what to write. You're like, I've got a journal.
I've got the book, but it is blank or I'm journaling online or maybe even on
my phone. And there's this cursor that's just doing the the blinking. And I have
no idea what to put in that space. And I think there's a lot of pressure that we
put on ourselves when we're grieving to words around our experience to say
something profound. So I really hope that these prompts will be useful to you
because there's something that is uniquely haunting about staring at a blank
page when you're grieving. It's not just that they're often or not words for
grief grief does often describe as a wordless experience. It's the pressure to
like explain what's happening in here through here and with nothing but a pen and
a piece of paper. And they seem like these little teeny tiny tools in the
face of something as as big and as monstrous and as overwhelming as grief.
This was my experience and see if this sounds like you you're sitting down to
right hoping that journaling about what you're feeling might help and trusting all
of this online advice including some of my own that says writing is good for you
when you're grieving. But you look at the page and you've got your pen in your
hand and your brain goes kind of fuzzy and your heart aches because you really
really want to do this. But you don't know where to begin and so you don't end up
writing anything. The page stays empty and then if you're anything like me
there's this voice of shame that comes in too that says why can't I even do this?
This feels like so little in the face of grief. Why can't I even do this? And if
you feel like the blank page is something you're fighting or coming up against
this reframe might be helpful to you. It is something that I gradually sort of
adopted in the wake of my mother's death and that is the blank page is not here
to shame you. It is an invitation or doorway or a space to spread out. One of my
favorite podcasts maintenance phase often refers to spreading out in the
living room of their show of an empty podcast and open mic as the ability to
have a space to spread out. And you can see your your grief journal as the same
thing. It's a space to say what's on your heart without having to be poetic or
without having to be coherent. You don't have to know exactly what to write and in
this space spreading out in the living room of your grief journal. You just have to
be willing to try or to exist to sit in there and to take up space. And again
whether you're grieving somebody who died or relationship that ended or
diagnosis that changed your life or a version of yourself or a version of a
life that you thought you would be in right now. These are all really good
gentle prompts that help you meet the page with compassion. Again these are not
prompts that are about losing someone to death specifically the death of a loved
one. They are prompts that are universal fits for whatever grief you're facing
no matter how long ago the loss happened or what type of loss you're facing.
Number one one of my all-time favorites right now grief feels like insert
your thoughts here. This is a helpful prompt because grief is weird and shape
shifting and strange and a lot of people describe grief as kind of this
nebulous blob that is shifting and changing moment by moment day to day as
sometimes even hour by hour. And so putting words to as best you can how grief is
showing up right now in this moment can be really really helpful for
defining exactly what it is that you're experiencing right now and so you could
describe grief maybe as a fog or a weight or a storm or a giant or maybe a very
very subtle whisper. I often describe my grief as a record player something
that tells the same story over and over again in the background. In my
after-loss academy my students and I talk about our own record players of just
grief telling the truth all the time. And so grief is a record player that
constantly plays in the background. My mom is dead. My mom is dead. My mom is
dead. My mom is dead. And if you've experienced multiple losses as many of us
have we have many record players going in the background and these record
players aren't necessarily threatening. They're not necessarily getting
closer or louder. They're just playing the truth over and over and over again.
Some days that's exhausting. Some days that reminds me of the preciousness of
what I'm living right now. And some days it's just really easy to tune out and
ignore. It changes day by day but starting to recognize grief as different
objects or different animals or different people or different presences in my
life has helped me through the years define exactly what I'm talking about when
I'm talking about grief in any given moment. And readers of my first book
permission to grieve will remember that I referred to my grief as a wolf
trapped down in the basement. And this came forward for me while journaling
because I was really for the first two years after my mother's death trying to
ignore the fact that I was grieving. I thought that I bought into society's
belief that if you push it down or away for long enough it'll go away and it
won't feel so big or bad anymore. And then the flip side of that is if I let this
wolf out of the basement, it could kill me or elbow crazy. That's exactly what I
was telling myself is this grief is so big and so bad and so all consuming that
I don't know who I'll be on the other side of feeling it. And so it's much safer
for me to keep this wolf of grief trapped down in the basement. And by journaling
about it feeling that way and and picturing it that way in my brain I was able to
come up with even more metaphors. For example, hearing grief howling at night, the
only time that I would really engage with my grief was before I would go to
sleep. I would not really think about it or engage with it or let myself feel
it during the day. And slowly but surely I had these experiences with my
grief where I felt not safer because I don't think we can ever necessarily feel
safe in the presence of grief. But more comfortable allowing grief to rush forward.
And again, as I tell the story and permission to grieve, there was a day when I was
working downtown and someone stole my wallet. And that was the day that that
broke down the door that tore down the floodgates. Everything that I was
holding up against grief came down in an instant because something that was
so precious to me had been taken just like in my mother's death. Something so
precious and crucial to my life had been taken. And it was really the first day I
gave myself permission to grieve which turned out to be the title of the book. And
in that moment it was as if the wolf had been set free from the basement. And it
didn't devour me and I didn't go crazy and I didn't I didn't die. Which I
thought was a very real possibility of feeling the experience of grief would
end up happening as I gave myself permission to grieve. I wailed and I sobbed and
I essentially threw a tantrum about everything that I'd lost. My mom's death had
happened two years prior to that. So stuffing this wolf down for quite a long
time. And by letting it forward it was the first time I really felt all the way
connected to myself again. But I would not have had language for that. And I
certainly would have not turned into a book. I'm not saying you need to write a book.
But I certainly wouldn't have turned it into a book. If I had not had this
metaphor experience or this answer to the question right now my grief feels
like. So that's a really wonderful place to start off. Whether you think your
grief is a living thing or a storm, something that comes and goes, something
that's kind of playing in the background, something that's an Adam and object, you
get to choose. You get to decide or you can let your grief speak, which leads us
into the second prompt here. Number two, if my grief could talk it would say
insert things here. And here's why this is helpful because while grief is a part
of you, grief exists in your world, it also has its own voice. It is also separate
from you. It is, it is an element of you. You are not all grief. You are yourself
and grief is a large component of who you are in the world. But by allowing grief
to talk to you, it puts like this little, this little inch of separation between
you and your grief, it opens up a room for conversation, where as previously as
a lot of my students and clients will say, it feels like grief has swallowed
them or is overtaking them or as if they are just swamped by the energy of grief.
And this is something we do in life after loss academy where we picture grief is a
living thing and then we then we talk to it. And this prompt invites you to give
grief a chance to say what it needs to say without interruption. And if you can
without judgment and it may surprise you with what it has to say, it might show up
as a protector. It might show up as a truth teller. It might show up as a
comforter or someone who wants to remember things with you or a teacher. Grief can
show up in a lot of different formats or it may show up as a creature in pain
that that just wants your attention that just wants to be seen. This is true for
so many grieving people whose stories I've seen shared online and it's just
another way of allowing grief to show itself to you in a season maybe when it's
hard to see or the only way you know to interact is to silence it or push it away.
And that's not your fault. That's something that society teaches us to do is to
push grief down and away. But but something that we can do to begin
growing with it and encouraging ourselves to be in existence alongside grief is
allowing it to inhabit its full voice. If my grief could talk it would say.
Okay, number three, if these first two prompts don't resonate with you you don't
really want to humanize grief yet or make grief a living thing that can talk or
has a former shape. That's totally fine. Number three is probably your best bet.
It is, I miss the version of me who. Da, da, da. And this is helpful because
especially when we're grieving, loss doesn't just change the external
circumstances of our life, although it certainly does. That loss also changes
how we perceive ourselves and how other people perceive us. AKA like the building
blocks of our identity. So when you wake up in the morning, when you look in the
mirror before you go to sleep at night, whatever the circumstances may be,
you might not recognize the person that you are now or even if you do, you may
not like that person. And you might be grieving an old version of yourself that
lost took away that lost rendered untrue or invalid. You are no longer a
caregiver. You are no longer creative. You are no longer focused. You are no
longer motivated. You are no longer insert what you are no longer here. You are
no longer a married person. You are no longer a healthy person. You are no
longer person who lives in X zip code or X postal code in the world.
The circumstances of your life have changed and the identities that are tied to
those things are things that are also worth grieving.
This showed up in my own life and I always give this example and I think too a lot of
people it seems very small. But after my mother's death in 2013, I was in college and I
slept late and hard and often after her death. My body was like
walloped by the weight of her grief and I had been a morning person for my entire
life before my mother's death and my mom would even tell stories of me as a tiny baby
waking up in the morning and singing to myself in my crib until someone came to get me
because I was such a morning creature. It was like hard wired into my body, into my soul,
into my spirit as if the sun's awake so am I and I am happy to be here. I'm happy to be alive.
And after my mother's death, I missed sun rises. I missed morning alarms. I missed classes. I missed
so many things and I felt disconnected from this identity of a morning person that made me who I was
to a lot of people. This would be very small. But to me, this was extraordinarily big and journaling
about grieving my identity as a morning person helped me recognize that this was another part
of losing my mom that I also had to mourn. And gradually I started to develop rituals
for saying goodbye even temporarily to my identity as a morning person. For now, I'm releasing
this identity. For the time being, in this season, I am letting go my identity as a morning person.
And I seriously grieved that there are elements of ourselves that feel so court of who we are.
And loss just takes that along with everything else it's taken to. And so this prompt of
I miss the version of myself who is a really powerful open door to all the other things
you're grieving that you may not have actually named yet. And I'll tell you this too because if this
is the prompt you're starting with, please a little asterisk take caution here. This might bring up
feelings that feel too big for you to deal with as one single person. So I encourage you, as you're
creating this list to seek out support, whether you find it in life after loss academy, we devote a
whole module module to release to grieving the person we used to be and the hope streams and
expectations we used to hold we spend a lot of time on this or working with a therapist or other
spiritual teacher in your community that can support and guide you through this because oftentimes
the identities that that we hold and the the things that build up the blocks of who we perceive
of ourselves to be in the world are very, very great and losing them in addition to the primary
loss or the big loss that we have can feel kind of like a double or triple whammy of devastation.
And that's hard to do all by yourself. And so I would encourage you not to, especially if this is
the journaling prompt that you think or feel is like pinging the most loudly in your soul. Like that's
the thing I want to dive into. Take a little care, take a little caution. And if you can reach out for
support as you're doing this as well, whether it's for me or for anybody else in your community or
grief world that can walk alongside you in this. Any grief professional worth their salt will know
that you don't just grieve the primary loss, the big thing that happened, the one that society can see,
you also grieve tens or hundreds or maybe even thousands of secondary losses underneath it,
including the loss of identity. I'll tell you what, that's not a blank page anymore after you
start that list. Okay, number four. The thing no one sees is dot, dot, dot. And here's why this
specific prompt is helpful. Grief is really isolating. We were just talking about getting support
because a lot of times in life after loss things fall away. But especially when the world keeps
spinning and time has gone on, people tend to assume that well, they must be better now.
When I did a podcast interview with Rob Bell in 2019, I spoke about I was upright, I was standing up,
and so people thought I was okay after my mother's death. And it took about two to three years after
her loss to really start engaging with my grief. I was not okay. I looked fine. I had the presentation
of fineness, but it was very, very much a facade. It was very not real. And something that is really
helpful when you're staring at a blank page is to start by what is, what is no one seeing? What is
no one acknowledging? And the questions I kind of tack on to this one is like bonus questions,
part A, B, and C is what do you wish other people could immediately understand about your grief?
What do you wish that people could just see you and just bam, no onsite that this is a part of your
life or part of your history or a thing that you're dealing with right now? And said another way,
if you could wear a shirt that had a slogan or a single sentence on it, what would it be? What do
you wish you could relate to people without necessarily having to talk to them or to announce it
when you enter a room? And this journaling prompt is helpful because I think for the most part for
so many of us, grief feels invisible. It's something we carry without other people knowing. There's
that quote that goes around that's like be kind for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle,
but it's really easy to forget. I'll tell you, I walk around in the world as a grief coach,
oftentimes, feeling as if I am the only one fighting a hard battle. Those are on my worst days.
On my best days, I look around the grocery store and recognize their fighting a battle. They're
fighting a battle. He's fighting a battle. She's fighting about on their fighting a battle. I am able
to have that posture and that outlook on the world, but a lot of times, especially when I am deep
in my own grief, I feel as if I'm the only one who's mourning and something that helps me begin to
put words to why and how that's painful and what I want to do next is a really good invitation.
It's a really good practice to say the thing no one sees is and then insert whatever it is, you
feel like no one's seeing or noticing about you right now. Number five is another one of my favorites
and kind of similarly related to the thing no one sees is, but it's what are you seeing? What's the
view from your window right now? It's a small thing that brought me comfort today was and this,
let me tell you, speaking of asterisk, we got to bring in another one here because this one ain't
about gratitude, gratitude is such an insult when you're grieving. I am not interested in being grateful
for my life because a lot of times in grief and loss, we do not ask for our circumstances, we do not
ask for whatever befell us or whatever stormed through our lives and stole so much from us. We do not
wish for that and we do not have a thankfulness in our hearts for it being what is being served
on our plate right now. I ain't saying a blessing before eating that. To bring out a little of my
Southern right now, I am not saying a blessing before being forced to eat that right now.
Instead of gratitude, something that you can shift your perspective towards softly. As Martha
Beck says, turning the boat by one degree or turning the plane by one degree, eventually you'll
end up in a different location than where you originally set out for, turning just by one degree,
swiveling by one degree from gratitude to comfort is really, really helpful in your grieving because
I do not want or need you to be thankful for what happened in your loss. What you can do is notice
what's bringing you comfort today and in this moment. You do not have to look at everything that's
happened and saying I'm so grateful to be alive. You may not be. You may not be and that's a very,
very real experience in life after loss. What you can do is notice this small teeny tiny thing
brought me comfort today. This is what I'm seeing. This is what I'm experiencing. This could be for so
many grievers that I speak to. These are things in nature. This could be bird song. This could be a
piece of art. It could also be the ways that you're communicating with other people. So text from your
friend or a kind acknowledgement from your boss. Maybe it could be a warm scarf, an article of clothing,
sometimes tactile things are really comforting to us. Sun rises again going back to my morning
person. Maybe you're a sunset person or maybe you're a moon and stars person. Maybe you're like,
I'm not interested in the sun. I am interested in the nighttime. But maybe those are things that are
comforting to you. I've got a warm cup of tea here. Maybe it's a warm cup of tea. Maybe it's
something you ate. Fresh pastry. That could be a comforting thing as well. Maybe it's something you
didn't have to do today. That can be comforting. Maybe it's something that you got to do today. That
can also be comforting. I know that for a lot of grieving people nature is something that they turn to.
And I also know for a lot of grieving people nature is something that is a reminder that time keeps
going. Whether the leaves are fallen off the trees or the crocuses are popping up in the spring time,
nature can be a reminder that time keeps going. And again, if you shift that perspective of time
keeps going to, I am noticing things that are beautiful about time keeping going. That is another
way to find comfort and grief. Again, not gratitude, but comfort. In 2020 on Mother's Day, I did an
interview with Cheryl Strayed in partnership with Alicia Forneray for Motherless Mother's Day. It
was like a long weekend of Mother's Day events for grieving people. And Cheryl talked about being
20 years out from her mom, Bobby's death. And her mom's death was the reason or part of the
inspiration she wrote her memoir wild. And she shared the wisdom that her mom gave her in life,
which is to put yourself in the way of beauty. And it points to purposely
making decisions or choices that put you in spaces and places and in communities and environments
where beauty is already happening. And I love this because no more work is required of you other than
the intention to be beside beauty. The beauty will happen whether you're there or not. But to put
yourself there, whether physically, emotionally, mentally or spiritually and then to notice it is a
much smaller ask than produce beauty while you're grieving. That's a big, big ask when you're grieving.
But to put yourself in the way of beauty and then to notice it is a really, really beautiful
and much easier energetically practice when you're grieving. You don't have to expend so much
to try to get there. And so you could say with this prompt, a small thing that brought me comfort
today was or you could certainly say this kind of a bonus prompt for you. A small thing that was
beautiful today was. And this beautiful thing does not have to be forced into being by you. You don't
have to make it with your own two hands. It can be something that you are appreciating as beautiful
for the sake of it existing in the world. Yeah. Okay. Number six, what I wish I could say to them,
to myself, to the world is. This is similar to the prompt we did previously on what no one sees is.
But this gives you a little bit of your power back. What I wish I could say to them is if I had the
words for this or if I could have the autonomy to announce this out loud, I would say. Because a lot
of times when we're grieving, we have a lot that we want to say and we have a lot that we want to express.
And all of that takes up space that takes up energy. A lot of times grieving people will say I feel so
anxious or I'm ruminating on saying this over and over again or I want my boss to know this or my
friends to know this or my family to know this. And writing down the words that you want to say,
even if you have no intention of ever saying them without judgment and without editing yourself
because no one will ever see these can be can be really helpful and really cathartic. It doesn't have
to make sense to anyone else, but you, even if it makes no sense to you, that's okay too. And it doesn't
have to be nice either. And that's a big old permissions slip that a lot of people need when
they're grieving, especially people who were raised as women because we are socialized to not feel
things like anger or rage or criticism or judgment. That is for stereotypically men to have.
Women are told that their best expressions of grief or their preferred expressions of grief in society
are things like tears or things like kind of hiding way or preparing food for others or taking some
sort of philanthropic action, starting a charity and making blankets for people. Absolutely wonderful
things to do when you're grieving, but things like anger, things like boundary setting, things like
feeling rage over something, things like wanting to to blow up for lack of better phrasing at the people
or the institutions or the structures and the systems in our lives is not acceptable. But I will say
that sometimes to this prompt, what I wish I could say is sometimes your angriest or most
instinctual thoughts like your knee jerk sentence that you could say to anybody right now
could be an indicator of something that you value deeply. In life after loss academy, we talk
about often the underbelly of anger is having values, is having things that you value deeply. For
instance, if your relationship broke up because you were cheated upon, maybe enter angry about that
understandably, maybe you value loyalty or communication or clarity about what this relationship is,
where it's going and how it's being defined and you didn't get those things. And that's more than
fine to feel rage or anger about that. And the underside of being angry about something is oftentimes
you value what it is that you're angry about. So for example, if what you write down is what I wish I
could say is to my friends, why the hell aren't you reaching out? It's been six months. My dad's still dead.
Why don't you, why don't you care anymore? Why are you acting like everything has gone back to normal?
Why are you planning our friendship vacation and not acknowledging all the ways that this is going
to change my life? That could be an indication that you deeply value your friendships and you still
want to be friends with these people, but also that you are aching to connect and to feel supported
still in your grief. You deeply value friendships and relationships that allow your grief to come along
for the right. And I will say in this prompt, I'm not asking you to do anything with this information.
Just simply recognizing what you're angry about can help you take next steps when you're ready.
I had a student in life after loss academy named Julia and she wrote about being frustrated with her
bosses who had like absolutely no flexibility when it came to her grieving her father who had just
died and then also taking care of being her mother's primary caregiver and her mom had dementia.
She was living in a care home during the height of COVID and so figuring out how to access her,
figuring out things with medication and timing and where they locked down, where they open and
available to visit how far away was everything, what kind of care was she receiving, what kind of
testing was going. There are many, many questions happening and as the sole point person of that
and also as somebody with a full-time job, her workplace did not know what to do with her and she
recognized by writing about it that this job is not a sustainable fit in the long term. This is not
an okay place for my grief to live permanently and she ended up again over time, not in the
instant she journaled about it but gradually over months she ended up leaving this job and then
getting another one at a tea shop with two other women who were gravers who were widows and they
understood what it was like to be grieving and to need to be working people at the same time and she
came back to the group and she told me in an email, a private email months later she was like, "I
have never been happier. I get to participate in one of my favorite hobbies as a job which is
drinking tea but that I'm surrounded by people who know what it is to have grief and work in the same
location." And that is something that exists. I didn't think that was something I could get for
myself but by journaling of what I wish I could say is to them, to myself, to the world,
she started to really put the pieces together of, "This is unsustainable for me and my grief" and I
could begin to have some sort of power here in shifting how this goes in the future. It's a really
wonderful story. It's one of my favorites from the group. Lastly, number seven, journaling prompt for
blank page, "If my goal in grief isn't getting over it, maybe it's insert your words here." And you've
listened to grief grower now for two full episodes, one trailer and two full episodes. So you know that
around these parts, we don't believe in getting over grief. There's no such thing as getting over grief
like it's an obstacle. You can just hurdle and hurl your body over. That might be society's goal
for you. It might even be your friend and family's goal for you. It might be your boss's goal for you.
It might be someone else's goal for you but it doesn't have to be yours. This prompt is all about
kind of like the last one reclaiming power and grief to define what healing means to you and set
goals and grief for yourself. So if getting over it, getting over it heavy air quotes, you can see me on
YouTube heavy air quotes. For instance, forgetting your losses, leaving grief in the past, never speaking
about your person's name if you lost your loved one or break up relationship. Pretending nothing's
happened. If none of that is your goal, what is your goal? You might consider goals that you
would set for this week. You might consider goals you might set for this month. You might consider goals
you'd set for this year. If you're interested in thinking about a whole year from now, where would
you like to be? How would you like to feel? What would you like your life to look like? There's an
article I wrote over my blog. You can find it for free. She'll be for sitya.com/blog about setting
New Year's resolutions goals around the New Year and tying grief into your resolutions. I know it's
not New Year's year round, but if you'd like some even deeper tips on setting goals for the New Year
and beyond, it's a really, really good and free place to start. There's a bunch of different ideas
for setting goals as it pertains to your grief because I'll tell you what grief changes how we set goals
in the aftermath of loss. It demands that we do things differently. For sure, oftentimes we have
different priorities. Oftentimes we have different motivations. Oftentimes we're forced into different
timelines or different tools or resources that we have to work with. Sometimes we have less money,
sometimes we have more money. Sometimes we have more time. Sometimes we have less time. Sometimes we
have a team of people around us. Sometimes the losses we faced mean that we don't have anyone.
And so we are working towards goals under totally different circumstances than we had before. Sometimes
we have lots of energy. Sometimes we have not. There are just so many different ways that grief
fiddles with how we're trying to move forward. That we know for certain that getting over grief is not
the goal. That gives us a lot of other options for what could be the goal in the future. And if you're
not entirely set on coming up with clear and distinct goals, frame all of them with maybe. That
word maybe in this journaling prompt does a lot of heavy lifting. If my goal isn't getting over it,
maybe it's blank. Brainstorm. Do not this is not the 10 commandments. This is not the
tone of your life. This is not going to be a published work. You can use this to list all of the
possibilities, all the considerations, all of the potentials that you might like to live in,
all the alternate realities that you might like to be true for your life with grief. If my goal
isn't getting over grief and I have to live with it forever, maybe my goal is insert something here.
I want to offer you some take away things as we close out this podcast episode. I hope that if
grief feels like you don't have words for it yet, that journaling about grief and these seven
prompts or whichever one or two or three or four resonate with you serve as a really good place to
start. I want you to know as I wrote in my book, Your Grief Your Way, you get to do grief your way.
You don't have to write every day. You don't have to be poetic or rational or logical in your writing.
You don't even have to finish a prompt. You can stop in the middle of a sentence. And I know for
so many perfectionists out there in the world, I'm looking at you. Hello, recovering perfectionist here.
That can feel so sacrilegious or so unsettling. And it can be another way you look at yourself and
you're like, wow, grief has made it. So I can't even finish a sentence either. Take a breath and let it
be true. Just start journaling about your grief with your grief in tow alongside your grief. However,
you'd like to picture grief in the room as you write. And I know for whatever this means to you and
however it shows up in your life, your grief will thank you. You will come away having expressed
something you haven't expressed before, having learned something, maybe you didn't know before.
And maybe even most helpfully putting words to something or a definition around something that you
didn't have words or definition to before. And that is so helpful when you're grieving at a time
when everything feels like blobby and amorphous and ambiguous and uncertain to last so words around it
and tie it down even if just for the moment that you're journaling, even if just for the moment that
you're writing. In this moment, it feels like clunk. In this season, I wish I could say clunk. I wish
someone would know about me clunk. These are all very certain definite things even if they only exist
in the moment that can really feel like a blessing in grief and your journal can act not only as a mirror
that you're holding up to yourself. But again, like a container, like a living room stretch out,
take up the space, get some throw pillows. It's yours. But also a witness and a diary and a log
of this season of your life. You can look back on past journaling entries. I've definitely done this
for myself and been like, wow, that's where I was. Not with shame or not with um distress or or cringiness
or judgment. But just like, wow, that was what I was focused on then. That was what felt important.
That was the biggest struggle. That felt like the biggest comfort going back to that prompt of
what feels comforting right now in this season. And then having that change, 36, 9, 12 months later,
isn't that interesting. How that's changed over time. Journaling can be that for you. Journals can be a
place in grief where nothing has to make sense. Everything is allowed, which is my favorite part.
And it just kind of like people putting their initials on trees or attaching locks to bridges. It's
like I was here. I was working through something. I was working out something. I was I was living through
something. And that is really significant and really, um, affirming and grounding and and kind of
rooting you back into the earth when you're grieving, which is a time when so many of us feel detached
from what it means to be alive and here on earth. And as always, I will say too, if you like journaling
about grief, if you want exercises even more about seeing grief differently or reframing where you
are in the world right now or releasing emotions that you're not necessarily sure what to do with
or wrapping language around things that don't have words for you in this moment. I really encourage
you as always to join us in life after loss of academy. It is open year round because grief has always
happened in it. And right now there are me and dozens of students in there who are standing by and
working through lessons on our own time at our own pace and coming together every week to talk
about what we're learning, how we're growing, in what directions we're growing because sometimes
they're the same and sometimes they're different. Honoring milestones together, which is such a big
and ultimately over and over and over again, finding and refinding the words, the metaphors, the language,
the visualizations to describe what the heck is going on when we're grieving. All losses are welcome,
all timelines, all all years, months, decades, it's been since your loss are welcome. And once you're
in the course, you are in it for life. It's not something that expires, which is one of, is by design
because if future stuff comes up with regard to an old loss, I want you to be able to have support
for that. And sadly, as new losses appear as they have in my own life too, I want you to also have
support from me and other people who know what it is to grieve. And you can find out more information
about that in the show notes as well. Thank you so much for joining me. Today grief growers, I am so
so glad to have been here with you. Get your pens, get your journals, and let's get to writing.
Writing about grief and I would love to know, love to know what you learned. I hope you'll find me
on social media, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, threads wherever you want to find me
and tell me what you're writing about if you'd like to share.
That's all for this episode of Grief Grower. Thank you so so much for joining me today.
If you're looking for grief support beyond this show, you can find free workshops and blog articles
like I mentioned and my signature, what's your grief support style quiz at Shelby for SITIA.com/links
and you can find that in the show notes. If today's podcast felt comforting, educational,
or otherwise helpful to you as you walk through grief, 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. I here to thank you to the grief growers community for supporting
the show on Patreon. If you'd like to join them and help me keep the show free from ads because
life is hard enough and grief is hard enough without commercials. Head to patreon.com/shellbeforSITIA.
As a Patreon supporter, you get to help me choose new topics and guests for the show and you're the
first to get behind the scenes access to everything that I'm creating like my new book which is coming out
in 2026. Grief Grower is hosted by me Shelby for SITIA and the theme music is composed by Addy Goldstein.
Until next time, 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.
[Music]