Grief Doesn’t Care How Well You Explain It

“To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow—this is a human offering that can border on miraculous.” — Elizabeth Gilbert

He nodded as I spoke
like he’d heard it a hundred times
and already knew how it would end.

He was right.
But that didn’t mean I felt seen.

He traced the arc of my suffering
with a clinical pen,
not realizing I was still standing in the fire.

When he asked how it made me feel,
I said “powerless,”
because saying “like screaming”
might have broken the room.

He said I was showing progress
because I’d named it.
I left wondering
if vocabulary was supposed to feel like safety.

“Some therapists intellectualize your trauma so cleanly, you forget you’re allowed to feel it.”

Insight without presence can feel like abandonment. Some professionals are trained to track the structure of your pain with surgical precision, but not its temperature. They give you tools. But not hands. That’s how emotional clarity sometimes sharpens the loneliness instead of softening it.

There’s a strange kind of confusion that comes after therapy sessions where everything made sense on paper, but your body still feels like it’s hiding something. It’s not sabotage. It’s protection. If your voice stayed quiet, it probably had a reason and it might not be ready to speak just because the room is.

Emotional logic isn’t a substitute for emotional safety. Understanding what happened doesn’t always mean you’ve integrated it. You can know everything about your triggers and still react. You can name your pattern and still collapse in it. That doesn’t make you broken. That makes you honest.

Healing isn’t a performance for a clipboard. It’s a reclamation that begins in silence. When you give yourself permission to feel what wasn’t allowed to be felt in the room, even if the room was meant to help you.

I’ve poured everything into this. Healing Thoughts II: 33 Poems and Meditations for Emotional Renewal is up for preorder now. Release date: October 1. These pages carry the deepest, sharpest work I’ve done, and I can’t wait for them to be in your hands.

Scraps + Bandaids:

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📚 When the pain overflows, it becomes a book.
🧢 Healing wears well when stitched into something real.
☕ This newsletter runs on coffee and confession.
🖤 Shadow Thoughts carries the pieces too jagged for here.

If this hit a nerve, you’re not alone.
Healing Thoughts is where I say the quiet parts loudly.
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It’s only getting rawer from here.