When Loss Breaks the Narrative:
On grief, blame, and the quiet work of reshaping the stories we carry.
Welcome to EverGrief
A home for the kinds of grief that often go unseen - quiet, complex, and deeply human.
I write from the landscape of chronic illness, unresolved grief, and the many other unnamed losses we carry. But this isn’t just about pain - it’s about presence. About living inside what doesn’t heal, and still finding meaning, beauty, and becoming.
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“When we change the story we tell about ourselves, we change the way we inhabit our lives.” — Toko-pa Turner
Our ancestors wove meaning through story.
When loss made no sense, storytelling became a sacred act - a way to reshape, reframe, and move toward healing.
Whether through folklore or fairytales, narrative was used to communicate wisdom across generations. Story shaped the seasons. It gave death, rebirth, and survival meaning. These tales paid reverence to the descent of our lives. They offered warnings and instructions on how to live.
But modern life?
It leaves little space for storytelling.
Fairytales have been flattened into Disney films.
Evening entertainment is no longer the shared ritual of tale-telling, but screens feeding us someone else’s narrative.
So what happens when the thread of meaning breaks?
When we experience trauma, when our lives rupture, we risk falling into storylessness.
Into the void.
And without the tools to tend to our wounds, we lose connection.
We lose community.
We lose trust in life.
Some may instead begin to live inside stories that no longer expand with us — stories that tighten, stories that once made sense but now squeeze the breath out of us.
Until finally, the need to shed them becomes greater than the need to hold on.
The stories within disenfranchised grief
When we don’t believe our grief is worthy.
When we don’t believe it’s even allowed to be named.
When we’re stuck in the comparison trap — the hierarchy of grief.
We stay stuck.
We are denied the deep truth that grief lives here.
We fall out of relationship with this part of ourselves, and instead become silently controlled by our fear of it.
We don’t get to feel the healing.
We don’t get the grace.
We don’t get the exhale.
Our life becomes frozen.
The Stories We Tell Ourselves
There was a time I walked away from a relationship feeling lost and deeply wounded.
For years, I carried a heavy story, one built on blame:
Blame for letting things go too far.
Blame for not leaving sooner.
Blame for whatever it was in me that had let it happen.
Blame and shame can harden us.
They distance us from our aliveness.
And when we numb to protect ourselves, we lose access to what truly needs tending. The part of us that has been frozen behind glass, in the name of protection.
The part of us we could finally meet.
But when we realise blame has been misplaced, when we understand that accountability and personal-responsibility are not the same as self-condemnation, we finally touch what’s underneath.
Once I could finally feel past that - what I found beneath was grief.
An ocean of it.
Loss. Fear. Frustration. Hopelessness.
but hidden inside all of these was something else:
Me.
Storytelling as a doorway
A course on storytelling became an unexpected doorway- not into forgetting, but into reframing.
I won’t claim the old story is gone. But it no longer holds me like it once did.
Now, when I look back, I see something else entirely:
A young woman doing her best with the tools she had.
Someone who found the strength to leave, even without a roadmap.
Someone who listened to a quiet inner compass and trusted it.
When we live through loss, we reach for language. It becomes our lifeline.
Words hold immense power especially the ones we haven’t yet spoken.
Sometimes, we absorb stories from others:
From generational trauma,
to how we’re perceived; too sensitive, too strong, a burden, resilient.
Often times, we create stories from our own distorted inner gaze.
We must be conscious of where we place blame, of how we manipulate our stories just to make sense of the why.
Is your story one of:
failure?
abandonment?
fierce independence?
unfairness?
inner strength?
When you are too exhausted
Capacity ebbs and flows through grief.
Some days are for reshaping.
Some days are just for noticing.
You don’t have to find the meaning right away.
You don’t have to wrap your pain in a redemptive arc.
Noticing is enough.
Allowing a separation between yourself and the story is more than enough
When we allow our story to become malleable,
when we can work with it tenderly and creatively,
our lives can bend.
This place is one of reclamation.
What Story Are You In Right Now?
What story are you living in right now and who told it to you?
Is there another version waiting for you to let go of these outdated beliefs?
What happens if you stop narrating, and just listen?
The stories we tell ourselves in grief don’t need to be neat or wise.
They just need to be true for now.
And kind enough to hold us as living, breathing beings.
I’d love to hear anything that stirs in you as you read. EverGrief is as much about community as it is about inner reflection.
If you know someone who might connect with these words, please feel free to share. It’s through your heartfelt recommendations that EverGrief finds its people.