#grief work

[nixscriptum]

[cloudswamp]

grief work, natalie diaz

[3am-tarot]

collective grief lives under everything these days, which can make active or personal grief even sharper. there is much to grieve right now, which is why learning how to recognize your grief, listen to your grief, and live alongside your grief is more essential than ever. this tarot spread can help you use tarot, an excellent tool for building resiliency, for honoring your own experience of grief. . if grief work is something you're interested in, if you also know that grief work and tarot go hand in hand, keep january 26th (around 7pm EST) open. i'm putting together a free digital event to help offer some support. more soon 🖤 . sending y'all a lot of love.

[hithisrmyimaginesaccount]

losing someone to death really shakes everything up like what do you mean they’re not here anymore? where could they have possibly gone? i can’t even say hello or i love you again and hear them say it back? fuck that. i can never catch a glimpse of them again? not even once? not even in another, say 10 years? what is this place they’re all in? why is the curfew so strict? why can’t i see them again? at least once? don’t trees die every winter but they come back in the spring. why is this bias only for humans?

i want to see my human again. at least for another minute, so i can tell them i love them and i am a fucking mess. i want to see my human again.

[ruinfolk]

"A History of Women: Vol I."

[spioderman]

my therapist told me she has a friend who said she had an ‘injustice wound she needed to heal’. like she was wounded by the injustice of the world and the solution was to just heal it internally. like yeah the worlds fucked up have you thought about just healing the inner part of you that cares about others? which is such a selfish mindset. not saying you can’t find peace or softness in this world but you cannot ‘heal’ the wound of caring about the broken world you live in and experience. i think the idea of fully healing from that is like nonexistent for most people, because most people will continue to be directly effected by the awful shit happening in the world, and hopefully care about others who are experiencing worse. The solution imo is to learn how to grieve, and how to take action, but don’t just accept this world as all there ever will be. that’s what the fascists want; everyone who believes in something better to give up, become internally self sufficient, and not treat the injustice as an existential horror that must be stopped. but it must be stopped and we cannot heal the inner wound entirely because the injustice is still fucking happening. and unfortunately it always will be to some extent. i think grief work is my alternative to the mindset of healing, i cannot heal in a broken world, not entirely, so i learn how to grieve this world, and through that learn how to exist in a world with so much pain, and through that grief i find meaning in supporting those still here. grieving reminds me the importance of human life, both past and present, and empowers me to feel present in this world and this fight.

[kimchicuddles]

ok ONE MORE throwback (I apparently like a lot of my old comics and couldn't decide what to repost lol). But I wanted to post this one because it feels both recent AND very long ago. This was a grief I thought I'd never move through... but I DID... Maybe I got bigger, or maybe it got smaller, but whatever happened I want you to know that whatever you're going through will also change ❤

[unlesswedont]

A LETTER TO 16 YEAR OLD ME

My dearest version of me,

I know I can’t change what happened to us. I wish with all my heart that I could—because you deserved so much better.

You didn’t think you deserved better, and I get that. But that isn’t your fault.

None of what happened was your fault.

The grown men in your life dressed up harm as affection, acceptance, and validation—the three things you wanted more than anything from our father. And the thing about men like that is they can smell uncertainty and self-doubt like sharks smell blood in the water.

The only difference between sharks and them is this:

Sharks are honest.

They don’t try to convince you it was your idea to be eaten alive.

They don’t gift-wrap your pain and call it love.

But these men…

They didn’t “win.”

They didn’t “conquer.”

They drugged you.

They groomed you.

They trapped you.

They stole your innocence, and the faith you had in anything good.

You put yourself out there for the first time in your life, and you were met with bad luck and worse intentions. And yes—we let it control us for a while. We tried to numb it. We tried to pretend it was our idea, because pretending made the shame easier to bear.

But we did that to survive. And we did.

You survived.

We aren’t trapped anymore. They don’t hold us.

They don’t get to narrate our story.

Yes, we made mistakes afterward.

But no one gets to blame you for that—not when you were a child trying to rebuild yourself without any blueprints.

You didn’t have the tools.

You didn’t have a safe place to bleed out the venom they left behind.

And that? That was never your burden to fix.

I forgive our parents for not knowing better than making us too scared to tell them what was happening.

And I’m so sorry that I can’t go back in time and protect you. But I am SO grateful for you protecting me the best way you knew how.

Because today—

You don’t drink.

You don’t use.

You don’t accept less than you deserve.

You’re raising two sons who know how to treat women with dignity and respect.

You broke the pattern.

You did that.

We did that.

Because we are so much more than what they did to us.

From the One Who Wouldn’t Be Here Without You,

— Me