Grief takes ahold of you. It overpowers you. You do not get to decide when you have had enough of grief. You will want to stop grieving. You will want to move on. You will wish you could process things faster or better or “more like other people,” but you will find that the precise amount of grief that is allotted to you is yours and yours alone. You do not get to say when you have grieved enough. It is grief, itself, which determines when it has had enough of you. Grief works from its own timeline, not the one you bring to it. And the timeline grief has for you is not the same as the timeline grief has for other people. Other people telling you that you’re taking too long to work through your grief is just as useless as you trying to tell your grief you’re done with it now. They don’t get to make that call. And neither do you. You must grieve your grief through all the way to the end uniquely set aside for you, wherever and whenever grief determines that end is. You must grieve passionately which, as with any passion, is something that requires endurance.

Discussed in this post: 9 BOOKS (Genome Editing and Engineering; Security, Territory, Population; We Do This ‘Til We Free Us; The Tragedy of Heterosexuality; Work Won’t Love You Back; Heart Berries; Mountains of the Mind; The Taiga Syndrome; and Tenth of December); 5 MOVIES (About Endlessness; Gretel and Hansel; Relic; Saint Maud; and Midsommar); and 3 DOCUMENTARIES (A Survivor’s Guide to Prison; This Way of Life; I’ll be Gone in the Dark; and A Glitch in the Matrix).