Grief doesn’t follow rules - It rewrites them
Grief isn’t here to break us. It’s here to break us open.
I’m in it right now. A raw grieving process. It’s not abstract theory or a leadership exercise - it’s my daily reality. And maybe that’s why I need to write this, not as advice, but as witness.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross gave us the five stages of grief. Denial. Anger. Depression. Bargaining. Acceptance. They’ve been printed on posters, taught in classrooms, and turned into neat little charts. But if you’ve ever actually grieved, you know: it’s messier than that.
Grief doesn’t move in straight lines. It loops back, collides with your body, hijacks your nervous system, and sneaks up on you in the grocery store aisle. It’s not a tidy checklist. It’s a rebellion against the illusion that life can ever be controlled.
Here’s the science-y bit: grief literally reshapes your brain. fMRI studies show that the same neural circuits that light up for physical pain also fire when we experience deep loss. Stress hormones spike. The hippocampus (memory) and amygdala (emotion) get into a stormy dance. Even the prefrontal cortex - the part that helps us plan, regulate, “keep it together” - gets disrupted. That’s why you forget words, lose track of time, or feel like you’re walking through fog.
And then there’s neuroplasticity - the brain’s built-in ability to rewire. Over time, new pathways spark, new connections knit together. Not to erase what’s been lost, but to weave it into a new pattern of meaning. Healing isn’t about “moving on.” It’s about reshaping your inner landscape so the loss has a place - carried, honored, integrated - as you continue forward.
So maybe grief isn’t something to “get over.” Maybe it’s the most radical teacher we have. It strips away autopilot. It dares us to feel what’s unbearable. It forces us to reorganize life from the inside out.
That’s not weakness. That’s wild, human strength.
And here’s the rebel twist: what if we stopped treating grief as a private failure to “bounce back”? What if we saw it as proof of being profoundly alive? In a culture obsessed with productivity and positivity, grief is an act of resistance. It says: I loved. I cared. It mattered.
My pain and grief come in waves. I ride them, and in the rawness I feel alive. I don’t yet know what comes after this, but I do know this: grief isn’t here to break us. It’s here to break us open.
A few reflection questions:
Where does grief live in your body right now? (Jaw, chest, gut, breath?)
What part of what you’ve lost still feels woven into who you are?
What, if anything, is being born in you because of this loss?
What’s one small ritual you can create to give grief space? (Journaling, walking, silence, music...)
Who in your life can hold your grief without trying to tidy it up?