Nobody warns you properly, do they? You go through life thinking grief is something that happens in films, where people cry beautifully in the rain and then pull themselves together over a lovely montage. Then it actually arrives in real life, and you discover it feels more like being hit by a bus while simultaneously being expected to make dinner, answer emails, and pretend you are fine in the school car park.

Unlike many other articles on the subject, which promise to “Curb grief with these 5 steps”, I am not going to offer you a tidy little checklist. Because grief doesn’t work like that, and anyone who tells you it does is either lying or has never actually been through it. What I can offer you is a straight, no-nonsense conversation about what grief actually looks like, why it doesn’t follow a predefined script, and how you can begin to find your footing again when the ground has completely disappeared beneath you.

Loss comes in more shapes than we admit

Most of us tend to talk about grief as though it only arrives with a funeral. But loss is far broader and far more ordinary than that. It comes when a marriage ends, when your teenager walks away from you in the shopping centre and you suddenly realise you have lost the small child they used to be. It comes when a friendship quietly dissolves, when a dream you carried for years finally proves itself impossible to attain, when your child is diagnosed with something that rewrites the whole future you had imagined for them.

For teenagers especially, grief is often dismissed by the adults around them. Their losses are labelled “dramatic, temporary, or trivial.” That first heartbreak, the collapse of a friendship group, failing at something they cared about deeply; these are real losses, and they deserve to be treated as such. The nervous system doesn’t check your age before it decides to shatter your world.

“And what about the moms?”, you may ask. You carry a particular kind of grief that is rarely spoken about in polite company. The grief of watching your child suffer and being unable to fix it. The grief of your own unfulfilled ambitions, quietly shelved under the pile of school uniforms and extracurricular activities. The grief of the person you were before parenthood, a person you sometimes barely remember.

All of it counts and all of it is too real.

What grief actually does to you

Something that surprises most people is that grief is not just an emotion, but rather a full-body experience. Your brain under grief operates differently; your concentration disappears, your memory becomes unreliable, and your decision-making goes completely sideways. Contrary to popular belief, this is not a sign of weakness or neurological decay or old age. It’s the brain's threat-response system, the neurological part specifically designed to keep you alive in genuinely dangerous situations, and unfortunately it cannot easily distinguish between a physical danger and an emotional devastation. It simply responds to both with the same chemical cocktail.

Which is why you might find yourself forgetting basic things, snapping at people you love, feeling exhausted even after ten hours of sleep, or experiencing a strange, floating numbness that makes everything feel slightly unreal. You’re not going mad (not yet anyway). Your brain is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do under extreme stress.

This also means is that grief demands patience, not just emotionally but physically as well. You cannot think your way out of it, and you cannot rush it by sheer force of will (trust me, I’ve tried.) I know it’s not what you want to hear, particularly if you are the sort of person who prefers to deal with things efficiently and move on. But grief, unfortunately, doesn’t give two hoots about your schedule.

The things we do instead of feeling it

One of the most interesting things about human beings is our extraordinary talent for avoiding discomfort. We’re creative, resourceful, and deeply committed to not sitting with pain if there’s any other option available. And thus we resort to staying busy. We reorganise the kitchen at midnight. We throw ourselves into work with oddly suspicious levels of enthusiasm. We eat things and drink things we normally wouldn’t, and scroll endlessly through our phones looking for something that will briefly interrupt the ache in our chests.

None of this is inherently terrible. Distraction does in fact have its place, since keeping moving during the early stages of grief is sometimes the only way to survive. But there comes a point, and you will know when it arrives, when avoidance stops being survival and starts being a crutch and a different kind of problem.

That’s when you notice the unexpressed grief doesn’t disappear. It goes quiet for a while, but it tends to find other exits, like anger that seems disproportionate to the situation, or anxiety that appears to come from nowhere, or a low-grade flatness that colours everything slightly grey. The feeling has to go somewhere, right? Better to let it out through the front door than to keep finding it climbing through the windows. Or is it?

What actually helps, and what really doesn’t

People will say things to you in your grief that are well-intentioned and spectacularly unhelpful. "Everything happens for a reason" is a personal favourite of mine in terms of things that make grieving people want to scream into a pillow. "They would want you to be happy" is another, delivered with great sincerity by people who are mostly just uncomfortable with your pain and would like it to stop now, please.

What actually helps is far less glamorous. Like the friend who turns up and does the washing up without being asked. Or just having one person in your life who doesn’t need you to be okay yet. It’s also physical movement, because grief lives in the body and the body needs to process it physically: walking, swimming, running, anything that lets you be in your physical self for a while without demanding anything from your emotional self.

It’s also, genuinely, crying. Most don’t realise that crying has a biological purpose. It releases specific hormones involved in stress regulation, and people consistently report feeling physically better after a proper, unrestrained sob. It’s your body’s way of doing its job, and it does seem to do it rather well, wouldn’t you agree?

On the flip side of the coin, what doesn’t help, even though we try it constantly, is comparison. Your grief is not bigger or smaller than anyone else's, because grief is not a competition. Telling yourself you shouldn’t be this upset because others have it worse is not “gaining perspective.” You’re in essence just dressing up cruelty to look like rationality. You’re allowed to grieve your own losses without auditing their severity against someone else's. The experience of grief is as unique as the individual experiencing it.

For the teenagers reading this

You’re not too young to feel this deeply, and regardless of others’ opinions, you’re not too dramatic for it to matter. The people who dismiss what you’re going through are often doing so because they have forgotten what it is like to feel things with the full, unguarded intensity that teenagers feel them. Or because they simply don’t know how to help you and minimising the emotions is easier than admitting that.

At the core of it, understand that your feelings are data. They’re telling you something about what you value, what you love, and what actually matters to you. I’d say that’s information worth listening to, wouldn’t you?

Find one person you trust and tell them the truth of how you feel. The actual truth, not a curated, palatable, watered-down version of the truth. You don’t have to carry this alone simply because you’re young. And if you feel no one is listening or no one understands or you don’t know how to deal with it, then reach out to me at tony@tonywake.com. Trust me when I say, in the 22 years of working with people, there’s not much I haven’t seen or heard.

The part where I tell you it gets better, except honestly

I’d like you to know it does get better. Maybe not in the neat, well-packaged, linear way that everyone expects (that would be convenient.) More in the way that is actually true: gradually, unevenly, messy, and emotionally. With the occasional backsliding that feel like you’re going all the way back to the beginning of the hurt, but never quite are.

“But Tony, what happens, if I let it happen? Won’t the loss become integrated rather than erased?” I hate to break this to you, but you don’t get over it. You first get around it, then alongside it, occasionally slightly ahead of it, and then slide back into it. Eventually you discover that carrying it has taught you something about your own capacity that you wouldn’t otherwise have known.

And that’s what matters. Dealing with grief is never easy. It changes us permanently and forces us to become that which we wouldn’t otherwise have been able to.

The choice you have though, always, is to either let it help you grow or let it break you down.

That power, is entirely in your own hands.