This is a thing many people outside your grief cannot understand: that you have not simply lost one person, at one point in time. You have lost their presence in every aspect of your life. Your future has changed as well as your “now”.
“I think you are having a different sort of heartbreak. Maybe a kind of heartbreak of being in the world when you don’t know how to be. If that makes any sense?”
— Kathleen Glasgow, Girl in Pieces (via nightlyquotes)
“(…) our self-perception is so distorted that we can only see that ugliness in ourselves, and we desperately fear showing it to someone else. We see our history as a wreckage of one failure after another, one mistake after the next, a chronicle of a ruined person and a ruined life. As we know, this distorted perception of ourselves as particularly awful human beings leads to our constant, often lifelong attempt to make people see us as better people than we think we are. The face we show the world and the face we see in the mirror are light-years apart, and we’re often desperate to make sure no one else sees the person we see in the mirror.”
— Marya Hornbacher, Sane: Mental Illness, Addiction, and the 12 Steps
