There is a grief that many of us are experiencing running in the background or in the forefront of our daily lives.
It's not grief in the way we've been taught to recognize — no funeral, no condolence text, no designated mourning period after which you're expected to return to normal. And yet it lives in the body the same way loss typically does: the tightness in the chest when you open your bank account, the low hum of dread that follows you into sleep, the way a news headline can leave you stuck or in a place of despair before you even started your work day.
What many of us are carrying right now is grief. And we deserve to call it that.
What We're Actually Losing
Grief is not only about death. At its core, grief is the response to loss — and loss takes many forms.
When inflation stretches a paycheck that used to be enough into something that barely covers rent, you lose more than money. You lose the version of yourself that felt capable of providing. You lose the plan you had for your future. You lose the quiet dignity of financial stability that you worked hard for and were told was yours to keep.
When unemployment extends past the point of your savings, past the point of your optimism, past the point where you can explain it away as temporary — you lose your sense of purpose, your daily rhythm, your place in a world that largely measures worth by productivity. The shame of it is its own kind of wound.
When the systems that were supposed to protect you — healthcare, housing, legal protections, institutions — reveal themselves, again, to be indifferent or actively harmful to people who look like you, you lose something harder to name: the last thin thread of safety you were holding onto. The belief, however fragile, that things might get better. That you might be protected.
These are real losses and they can compound. And for Black people and other communities who have never been afforded the luxury of assuming safety in the first place, they don't land in a vacuum — they land on top of generations of losses that were never fully mourned to begin with.
Why This Kind of Grief Is So Hard to Hold
Grief needs to be witnessed. Traditionally, we've done this through ritual — funerals, vigils, wakes, community gathering. But the grief of a destabilizing world doesn't come with ritual. It doesn't have a beginning or an end date. There's no closure on offer when the thing you're grieving is still actively happening. This creates a particular kind of disorientation. You can't grieve what isn't over, and you can't fully process a loss you're still in the middle of surviving.
And so the grief goes somewhere else — into the body, often. It manifests as hypervigilance that makes it hard to relax. It shows up as the irritability that surprises you. It creeps up on you as the numbness that makes it hard to feel joy even in the moments when things are okay. It falls on you like fatigue that sleep doesn't fix. This is what it looks like to be a human nervous system trying to metabolize more than any one body was designed to hold alone.
The Particular Weight for Black and Marginalized Communities
For many of the people I work with, the unraveling of a sense of safety in the world is not new. It is the continuation of something very old. The indifference of systems, violence — physical, economic, political — that has always been closer to home than the dominant culture acknowledges.
What may feel like a sudden awakening to others has been a sustained reality for Black Americans and other communities who have never fully been included in the promise of safety and stability this country offers to some of its people.
That history matters in grief work. When we talk about what you're carrying right now, we're often talking about layers — the present loss on top of the unprocessed losses before it, on top of what was inherited, on top of what was never allowed to be mourned at all because survival required moving forward. There is nothing pathological about feeling the weight of all of that. There is nothing to fix about having a nervous system that has been responding, appropriately, to real and ongoing threat. What is possible — slowly, with support — is learning to carry it differently.
What Healing Can Look Like Here
I don't think healing from this kind of grief means resolving it. The world hasn't resolved. The uncertainty hasn't lifted. The systems haven't changed.
What I've witnessed in my own work — and in my own life — is that healing looks more like building the capacity to stay present inside the uncertainty without being consumed by it. It looks like grief being witnessed and held, even without a tidy ending. It looks like the body finding moments of safety even when the outside world doesn't fully offer it.
Somatic work, which attends to how the body holds and processes experience, can be particularly meaningful here — not because it bypasses the reality of what's happening, but because it helps the nervous system find ground when the ground feels shaky. EMDR, which works with how the brain stores overwhelming experiences, can help when the accumulation of ongoing stress starts to feel less like stress and more like something lodged, something stuck.
Community, too, is not a small thing. The groups I offer exist, in part, because there is something that happens in shared witnessing that individual therapy alone cannot replicate. There is something about being held by people who are carrying similar things — who do not need you to explain why this is hard — that releases something.
If You're in It Right Now
If you recognized yourself somewhere in these pages, I want you to know: you are not falling apart. You are responding to genuinely hard conditions with the full weight of your humanity. You are allowed to grieve the world you thought you were living in. You are allowed to mourn the stability that was promised and then taken. You are allowed to feel the losses that don't come with a sympathy card. And when you're ready — support is here.