For a while now I’ve been thinking about grief. I wondered what it would feel like if I could hold it, what shape it would be if it were a pose. I thought if I could touch grief in this intimate/tanglible way, then when it came for me it would be more like a graceful befriending rather than an abandonment of everything that once was. This pose is the closest I can get – split open, twisted, and exposed.

Grief has the power to send us into a rabbit hole of self-pity, whether we lost someone we love dearly or we were never loved in the way we needed to be. There’s the before and after, the immense loss, the void that will never be filled in exactly the same way. But the reason we feel grief is love, so love should be the reason we claw our way out of that rabbit hole. Mostly love for ourself.

It’s OK that we’re here in this shape. And it’s important that we stay as long as we need to – to touch the emotion, to taste it, and to let it work its way through us. But please let’s just not stay here forever.