Grieving Inside Systems That Weren’t Built for You

There is a particular kind of loneliness in having something real happen to you and still being expected to keep functioning like nothing did.This episode is about grief inside systems that were never built to hold human pain well. It explores what it means to hurt while still being asked to work, answer emails, stay polite, stay legible, and keep moving. It names grief not as a personal failure, but as an embodied reality shaped by labor, class, race, disability, and the pressure to perform normalcy.In this episode, I talk about:having to go to work and keep performing while grievingbrain fog, exhaustion, numbness, slowness, and overwhelm being misread as laziness or incompetencethe extra pressure marginalized people face when their grief is watched, judged, or racializedhow poor and working-class people often do not have the luxury to stopwhy not everybody is allowed to grieve the same waywhat it means to put the humanity back into human experiencesIf this episode met you somewhere tender, I hope it helps you feel less ashamed of what grief has done to your body, your pace, and your capacity. Get full access to Soft Endings at lettn2mec.substack.com/subscribe