The Grief We Inherit, The Grief We Share

We are not broken. We are grieving. And we are not alone.

We are living in an age of layered grief.

It doesn’t always look like mourning. Sometimes it looks like burnout, detachment, rage, numbness. Sometimes it looks like doomscrolling, quiet quitting, canceled plans, or staring out the window wondering why you can’t quite feel anything.

We carry grief that is personal, inherited, and collective. Grief for futures we were promised and futures we can’t yet imagine. Grief for the planet, for justice delayed, for time lost to survival. Grief for family systems that couldn’t love us the way we needed. For bodies that carry trauma. For stories that never had safe endings.

And most of the time, we carry it alone.

Because the world we live in rarely makes space for grief. Markets do not pause for mourning. Institutions do not ask how you’re feeling. The myth of the self-sufficient individual leaves no room for collapse, no room for rupture, no room for being tender in public.

But what if grief wasn’t a private burden? What if it was a portal?

What if grief is a sign - not that we are weak - but that we are paying attention? That we are still connected to what matters?

We don’t all grieve the same losses. Some of us are parenting in collapse. Some are caring for aging parents with no safety net. Some are working three jobs just to stay afloat. Some are just entering adulthood, trying to imagine a future that doesn’t feel like a trap. Some are carrying intergenerational trauma in bodies that never got a chance to rest.

But we all deserve to grieve.

Grief is not something to fix. It is something to move through. Together.

So let’s make room. Let’s make grief visible. Speakable. Shared. Let’s create spaces where we can say:

• I’m not okay, and I don’t need to be fixed.

• I miss what never was.

• I want a different world, and I don’t know how to get there.

Grief does not mean we’ve given up. It means we care. It means we’re still tethered to what is sacred. And when we grieve together, something softens. Something opens.

We remember that we are not broken. We are human.

And in that remembering, we begin again.

Not with solutions. Not with certainty. But with each other.

This is the work now. To feel. To speak. To stay. To build new systems that hold us when the old ones fall apart.

Step outside your comfort zone and explore your grief with The Shadow Work Journal by Keila Shaheen.