Hello grief, my old friend

I caught myself humming Hello darkness, my old friend... the other day, only to realise that in my experience the darkness was never really the recurring visitor, grief was.

Life has developed a mean habit of forcing me to practise everything I study and write about. Every topic I have carefully researched, every psychological theory, every neuroscience paper eventually arrives at my front door asking: Well then... let's see what you've actually learned and put it to work.

The story has repeated itself so many times I am able to predict the next chapter. Something horrible happens, I survive it, I slowly stitch together a life that feels mine again and I begin making plans beyond next Tuesday. And then the moment arrives when I enthusiastically say to myself, Looks like this chapter is over, I feel light and happy again! And then… you guessed it right! Boom! Hit by a sniper from the side! A devastating diagnosis, a sudden death of the person who mattered most, years of grief, depression, burnout. And now... another goodbye.

There is a funny Polish question I have recently asked myself more than once: "Panie Premierze, jak żyć?" Literally: Prime Minister... how are we supposed to live?

It became a national joke because it captured something so very human. We tend to ask impossible questions to people who cannot possibly answer them. And we do it because the pain, our pain, demands an audience.

My question, of course, isn't addressed to a politician. It is addressed to the universe, any God, high power, energy or alien willing to hear me and share the answer. How am I supposed to keep going when life appears to measure time not in years but in catastrophes?

From crisis to crisis?

The human brain has a tendency to remember trauma as one continuous story. Neuroscientists call this memory reconsolidation. Every time we revisit a painful memory, we replay it like a recording and we rebuild it. The present sometimes edits the past and new experiences become entangled into old ones. This is why grief can feel cumulative and one loss may wake up another we thought we processed and put behind us.

Our brains are pattern-detecting machines. They evolved to identify danger before hope. So when we are faced with a repeated hardship, they naturally begin constructing a narrative: Life is becoming one endless sequence of disasters. Please don’t go there, it’s a deep, dark rabbit hole. Believe in psychology when it says that narratives are interpretations, not objective reality.

So a crisis can also be renamed to an opportunity to demolish and build again, kind of like getting a new kitchen only we’re furnishing our internal room with skills, hopefully with kindness and (emotional) maturity.

The spark & the fire

One of the misconceptions is that our lives are defined by what happens to us. We are the survivor or the victim of or recovering from. Psychology claims that yes, indeed, events matter enormously, but they occupy surprisingly little psychological space over a lifetime. From that perspective: it is our response that becomes our identity.

The death itself lasts a day but the relationship we develop with the absence may last decades.

The scary diagnosis is shared in a single conversation but the courage the healing demands may reshape an entire personality.

The event is the spark, the journey becomes the fire.

Alain de Botton once said that adulthood was less about avoiding suffering than about becoming someone capable of carrying it with elegance. I think the problem is that some of us, myself included, mistakenly believe resilience means not breaking.

What if resilience is allowing ourselves to break without concluding that we are broken? The brain continues to rewire itself, not because pain is pleasant but because adaptation is essential. Every loss forces neural networks to reorganise, habits disappear, future plans are no more, relationships dissolve and as a result of that our identity becomes temporarily unstable. That instability is not evidence of failure, it only shows that the brain is doing exactly what it evolved to do: rebuilding.

Are all emotions beautiful?

We have developed an irritating habit of romanticising every emotion. Sadness, melancholy, anxiety, grief are so beautiful. Well… Not always. Sometimes grief is exhausting, repetitive, unfair and deeply inconvenient. Anxiety steals years that should have belonged to living. Depression convinces an intelligent brain that we are unable to handle tomorrow.

I think that beauty is not found inside the emotion itself, it emerges in what the emotion makes possible. What the experience teaches us and hopefully leaves us with some extra: compassion, perspective, patience. The ability to recognise another person's suffering without trying to immediately fix it.

Maybe this is how we live

We probably won’t outsmart grief. We could invite it to sit down for tea without allowing it to redecorate the entire house. We shall stop treating every new heartbreak as evidence that life is against us. And lastly - let us recognise that each devastating chapter also starts up the remarkable capacity of the nervous system to heal, reorganise and love again.

Why don’t we swap: how do we avoid suffering? with: how do we remain available to life, even after suffering has introduced itself again?

So grief, my old friend… you may visit, but you do not get to decide how the story ends.