Grief: deep sorrow, especially that caused by someone’s death.

Many of us struggle with things we may or may not try to conceal a lot of the time. Grieving is a normal process that many people unfortunately have to go through. In many cases a person may feel like they have to hide their grief “stay strong” which evidently causes your grief to deepen. 

Tough times, as sad as it is, are not hard to come by, it’s an important show of character how we choose to overcome them.

“Take your time and be patient. There is a wrong way, drugs and alcohol are the wrong way. But take your time with it, sit with it, and allow yourself to feel all the things that need to be felt, or you’ll never be able to process them,” Gerald Smiley, motivational speaker said.  “Another thing is sit still for 30 minutes a day. Just sit still, Just be present and just turn off everything. Let your mind just think.”

 For many teenagers or adults, taking time for ourselves and letting our minds and bodies take a break is a hard thing to do. But understanding that it is necessary to give ourselves a break to process big feelings is important. 

“So there’s this balance where we need to be able to acknowledge our grief, feel our grief, process our grief, but we might still need to go to school or go to our jobs or take care of our families. And sometimes that balance might be to offer people the space, to take a break from some of those things,” Shanna Crooks AHS counselor said.

Something that always seems to get jumbled up in the storm of emotions we face when we’re grieving is balance, we can sometimes lose our train of thought and be pushed off the tracks we were on and sometimes it just takes time to find our tracks again. 

“Concrete strategies that they can use, like self-care is super important for kind of processing and moving through grief, making sure that you’re taking care of yourself, making sure that you’re getting enough sleep, eating a healthy diet that’s gonna support your physical health, continuing to spend time with friends and supportive people, continuing to do things that bring you joy,” Allison Bennett AHS counselor said. 

In our society we are almost conditioned to keep our emotions locked away and not show vulnerable sides of ourselves.

“Being able to understand that everything in life is what it is, it doesn’t matter. Can’t change it. And it really allowed me to sit still and just get clarity over a lot of things, but also clarity over which battles I choose to fight? Which battles do I choose to even give energy to? And I don’t know, I just feel like at the end of the day, it allowed me to slow down and process things better too,” Smiley said, “Being able to see what’s right in front of me and just tackle that instead of everything down the road. Just deal with what’s right in front of you right now at this moment. But if we let it go, it’s going to multiply tomorrow because we didn’t deal with it today.”