The Grief You Keep Apologizing For

Paulett Boone

6/4/20263 min read

You Are Allowed to Be Sad

She sat across from me and said something I have heard more times than I can count.

"I feel bad for even being sad. Other people have it so much worse than me."

She said it quietly, almost like a confession. Like her pain was something she needed to apologize for before she was allowed to talk about it. And I looked at her and thought, how long have you been doing this? How long have you been standing guard over your own heart, turning away anything that might make you feel too much?

Because that is what we do. We compare our pain to someone else's and decide ours does not qualify. We measure our grief against the worst thing we can imagine and conclude that we have no right to feel what we feel. We become the judge and jury of our own suffering, and somehow we always rule against ourselves.

And in the process, we do not heal. We just get better at hiding.

Pain Does Not Have a Ranking System

I want to say something clearly and I want you to really let it in. Your pain does not have to be the worst pain in the world to be real. It does not have to meet a certain threshold before it deserves attention. It does not have to be dramatic or visible or something others would immediately recognize as hard.

If it hurt you, it counts.

If it changed you, it counts.

If you are still carrying it years later and pretending you are fine, it absolutely counts.

There is no ranking system for human suffering. There is no committee that reviews your circumstances and decides whether you have earned the right to grieve. Pain is not a competition, and you do not have to lose everything before you are allowed to fall apart a little.

What Guilt Does to a Grieving Heart

When we feel guilty for being sad, we do not just suppress the sadness. We cut ourselves off from the very process that would bring us back to life. Grief, when it is allowed to move, actually moves. It shifts and changes and eventually it loosens its grip. But when we shame ourselves into silence, it does not go anywhere. It just goes underground.

And underground grief has a way of showing up everywhere. In how short your patience is. In how disconnected you feel from the people you love. In the numbness that settles in when you have spent too long pretending. In the quiet ache that you cannot quite name but cannot quite shake either.

You were not designed to carry pain in secret. You were not built to perform wholeness while falling apart on the inside. That is not strength. That is survival mode. And there is a difference.

God Is Not Waiting for You to Get Over It

Here is what I know about God and grief. He does not rush you through it. He does not hand you a timeline and tell you to be better by a certain date. He does not compare your situation to someone else's and decide yours is not worth His attention.

He meets you in it. Right there in the middle of the sad, in the middle of the confusion, in the middle of the season that has no name and no clear end in sight. He is not put off by your tears. He is not disappointed by your struggle. He is not waiting for you to pull yourself together before He shows up.

Psalm 34:18 says He is close to the brokenhearted. Not close to the healed. Not close to the ones who have figured it out. Close to the brokenhearted. That means right now, exactly as you are, you are not alone in this.

What It Looks Like to Stop Apologizing for Your Pain

Giving yourself permission to feel is not weakness. It is not self pity. It is not wallowing. It is one of the most courageous and necessary things you can do for your own healing.

It might look like finally saying out loud that you are not okay instead of defaulting to fine. It might look like sitting with a feeling instead of immediately trying to fix it or push it away. It might look like talking to someone, a trusted friend, a counselor, a coach, who can hold space for you without judgment. It might look like getting honest with God in a way you have not allowed yourself to be in a long time.

Whatever it looks like for you, it starts with one decision. The decision to stop standing in the way of your own healing.

You are allowed to be sad. You are allowed to grieve what you lost, what never was, what you hoped for and did not get. You are allowed to feel the weight of a season that has been harder than anyone around you knows.

And you are allowed to believe that feeling it is not the end. It is actually the beginning of finding your way through.

Your pain brought you here. Let that mean something.