I Thought I Was Broken. I Was Just Grieving

Grief doesn’t always look like sadness—it can look like strength, too.

I didn’t realize I was grieving.
Not at first. Not for a long time.

When my mother died suddenly in a car accident, I didn’t fall apart.
I didn’t scream or collapse in the way the movies show.
I didn’t even cry that much, not at the funeral, not after.

I just… kept going.
I went into autopilot.
I numbed myself to everything, both the unbearable and the beautiful.

I stayed busy. I poured myself into work, into doing, into taking care of everyone else.
I smiled when I needed to. Said I was okay. People believed me.
For a while, I believed me too.

What I didn’t know then was that I had buried my grief with her.

I didn’t know that the inability to feel joy was a form of grief.
That the numbness, the emotional detachment, the constant hum of disconnection, that was grief too.
I didn’t know I was surviving, not healing.
I didn’t know that silence can harden over sorrow like concrete.

For fifteen years, I lived like that.
Functional. Focused. Disconnected.
A quiet ache I couldn’t name, pressed down so deep I forgot it was even there.

I thought I was broken.
But I was just grieving.

Grief doesn’t always look like sobbing on the kitchen floor.
Sometimes it looks like overachieving.
Sometimes it looks like avoiding eye contact in the mirror.
Sometimes it looks like smiling on the outside and feeling nothing at all on the inside.

No one told me grief could be quiet.
No one told me it could feel like emptiness instead of sadness.
No one told me I could miss her and not even know I was missing her.

And because no one told me, I assumed something was wrong with me.
Too cold. Too detached. Too complicated. Too… wrong.

But it wasn’t wrong.
It was just the way my nervous system tried to survive a kind of pain I wasn’t ready to feel.

It wasn’t dysfunction.
It was protection.

Grief is so much more than sadness.
It’s a full-body, whole-being response to love interrupted.
To safety shattered.
To connection severed without warning.

And the world doesn’t always make space for that kind of pain, especially not the quiet kind.

But space is what it needs.
Space. Time. Tenderness. And truth.

So if you’re reading this and something in you recognizes this ache, this numbness, this low hum of disconnection, I want you to know something:

You are not broken.
You are grieving.

Even if the loss was years ago.
Even if you “should be over it.”
Even if you can’t point to a specific moment that unraveled you.
Even if you’ve been strong for so long you forgot what it feels like to be soft.

You’re still here. And that matters.

Grief doesn’t make you weak.
It makes you human.

Love today,
Heather 🌸