What Grief Taught Me This Year

I sat with grief a lot this year. It was my most consistent companion, whether I wanted the company or not. Whether my own or others’, grief was ever present. 

In some ways, this was by design. I began moving further into grief work as a professional pathway, taking a new role with a disability justice grief project and providing research and admin support for a writer finishing a book on hidden grief. I invested more time in building my own grief tending and processing skills. I prioritized client partnerships for my nonprofit consulting and coaching business based on groups’ programs and practices around grief, disability access, creativity, and spirituality. 

In other ways, its timing was frequently unplanned but its presence wasn’t necessarily unexpected. Friends, comrades, and acquaintances contended with changes and losses of all kinds, both recognized and not. The upheaval and destruction of climate change, war, genocide, and state violence continued across nearly every continent. My city and neighborhood became hot spots for daily immigration abductions and disappearances, and local and federal policing budgets continued their exponential growth. Disability, mental health, neurodivergence, and trans identities continued to be stigmatized and criminalized. A lot of people I knew died, and even more remained to mourn them. 

Part of this grief is why I haven’t written or posted much on my public platforms this year. In some instances, it took me a while to figure out the balance of vulnerability, discretion, and authenticity and by the time that happened, it felt like the moment had passed. In many others, I was navigating my own combination of overwhelm, depression, anxiety, and burnout so I craved rest more than anything else.

But I love a cyclical shift, whether it’s a sunrise or sunset, a shift in lunar phases, a change in seasons, or the end or beginning of the year. And so as I reflect on this year, I’ve been contemplating what grief continued to teach me in 2025.

Grief and grieving are political.

Loss and change are inevitable, yet media attention, cultural empathy, and policy proposals center and value the existence and manifestation of some people’s and communities’ grief over others. Many of these disparities occur along the same lines of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, gender, sexuality, religion, disability, national origin that have perpetuated inequalities for centuries. The empathy gap in legacy media language and philanthropic funding towards people experiencing the daily violence of war in Ukraine versus Sudan, the manufacturing of consent for ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza, the criminalization of racialized children and adults grieving loved ones murdered by police or abducted by ICE / Border Patrol, and the long-held belief that Black people can tolerate higher levels of emotional, mental, and psychic pain are just a few examples. Even after the murder of right wing pundit Charlie, the federal government punished hundreds who they decided weren’t properly performing grief on social media. Grief doesn’t become disenfranchised and suffocated on its own but is experienced that way as a result of the same social and cultural forces that shape other forms of harm and violence. Acknowledging and attending to grief becomes then not only a question of what one person or group of people may need at a specific moment, but also one of how we collectively address the intergenerational impacts of colonization, white supremacy, and racialized capitalism.

Grief tending is disability access and justice.

There’s no singular experience of grief but its various impacts can be felt physically, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually. My own experiences of grief - sadness, brain fog, fatigue, sensitivity to noise and light, insomnia - have both mirrored and amplified chronic illness, disability, and neurodivergence. Tending to my grief has asked me to slow down, make space, and accept support and care. My grief has never fit neatly into the allowable number of business days previous jobs have granted, if they’re losses that HR policies recognize at all; some, like a friend’s death, were given leeway while others, like news of anti-trans policies or continued COVID erasure, were completely invalidated. Like grief tending, the Disability Justice framework is decidedly anti-capitalist, acknowledging that we have inherent worth and can simply exist without demands to work, produce, or create. It fosters the interdependence of meeting each other’s needs, whether it’s sharing food, providing emotional support, running errands, or raising funeral expenses. It centers sustainable pacing and honors people’s autonomy and self-determination. A benefit of ongoing solopreneurship has been the ability to simultaneously attend to my disability and grief needs. This has looked like flexible hours and working conditions, accommodations for a wider range of access supports, recognizing various forms of grief outside immediate family death, and prioritizing projects and clients that understand disability, grief, or both. Integrating Disability Justice principles and values into our organizations and institutions could make space for specific ways to attend to grief, such as acknowledgement and ritual, as well as organizational culture that assumes grief is a regular, ongoing experience rather than an occasional, acute event.

Grief comes from positive changes too.

Late last year, I was diagnosed with endometriosis after years of infertility and debilitating pain. I advocated for a hysterectomy, and the near-immediate relief I felt was so shocking that I questioned whether my surgeon had damaged my nerves (she hadn’t). 2025 is the first full year that I’ve lived without the all-encompassing, medication-intolerant pain that had come to shape every aspect of my ability to move, think, stand, eat, and bathe. It was another experience of gender affirmation and euphoria that brought me into deeper alignment with myself. Still, I can’t help but wonder how different the past decade of my life might’ve been had my pain been taken seriously when it first began. Many of the positive changes or events I experienced in 2025 came with this type of grief. As more and more people speak out about the genocide in Gaza and demand an immediate “ceasefire” (in quotes because I know that the firing doesn’t truly cease), there’s pressure to welcome these newcomers and their changed hearts and minds; after all, we’re told, if they’re met with derision instead of acceptance then what motivation is there for others to also raise their voices? But in an ongoing genocide where Israel is reportedly killing at least 100 Palestinians each day - “ceasefire” or not - I continue to grieve for each person who may not have died had there been a pause in shootings and bombings one hour, one day, one week, one month earlier. The grief that’s surfaced from positive change has been one of the most difficult kinds of grief for me to contend with, tend to, and release this past year. Like so much of the grief I hold, I know that I can’t destroy or erase it and I know that its anger and bitterness is also natural and common. Grief isn’t a binary, and making space for grief’s complexity and unpredictability is itself a practice of tending to the nuances of our collective grief.

Tending to and releasing my grief connects the physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual. 

Spirituality occupies a central space in my life but it’s been an ongoing challenge to connect it to both artistic or creative practice and political or community work. One of the ways that I was able to bridge those gaps this year was through pungmul. Pungmul (풍물) is a Korean folk art rooted in dancing and drumming. Originating from Korean shamanic ritual and collective agricultural practice, pungmul has also emerged as a form of cultural organizing and protest on the peninsula and in the diaspora. Connecting to the Korean and Korean American community have always been complicated as a transnational and transracial adoptee; my ethnicity is clear but my identity and belonging have felt more fragile. As I began attending pungmul rehearsals, learning both the musical technique of the instrument but also its rich history of art, spirituality, and culture, I could feel my grief surfacing and releasing. Drumming became a refuge and a reclamation; I could simultaneously channel sadness and anger, connect to ancestors and the divine, and situate myself within a people’s history of uprising. 

The more I tended to my grief, the more it taught me how deep and expansive my grief truly is. The more I supported others in tending to their grief, the more opportunities I saw to change how we collectively make space for grief and grieving of all kinds. In 2026, I want to keep exploring disenfranchised grief - what it is, where we can make space for it, and how recognizing and tending to it can strengthen our relationships and movements.