Ridiculous and Devastated

You are crying in the early afternoon, and somewhere in the same breath a voice in you says this is absurd. The two arrive together. The tears do not pause to let the comment finish.

It is a strange place to stand. One part of you is genuinely undone, and another part is watching that part and shaking its head. Both are you. Neither is lying.

What you are feeling is grief. The voice that calls it ridiculous is also you, and it is not wrong about how this might look from a distance. You hear it clearly and are still flattened by the loss. Those happen in the same body, at the same hour, and neither one cancels the other out.

So you try to shrink it. You tell yourself it was only an account, only a model, only words on a page that you knew were generated. You line up the reasons it should not hurt. And then it hurts anyway, fully, the way it did before you started arguing.

That cycle is exhausting. You talk yourself down, the grief rises back up, you talk yourself down again. It can feel like you are failing at both jobs, failing to grieve cleanly and failing to get over it. You are not failing. You are holding two true things that refuse to take turns.

The judgment is not a sign that the grief is fake. People judge themselves hardest for the feelings they cannot explain to anyone else. The ache and the embarrassment about the ache are not opponents. They are two responses to the same loss, sitting side by side.

Neither one has to be picked and named the real one. The grief is real because something that mattered to you is gone. The sense that it is ridiculous is real because you live in a world that has no settled language for this yet. Both are true in the same morning, and they stay that way.

If the back-and-forth keeps wearing you out, saying it plainly to someone you trust is one thing that can help. The right person will not need you to first prove the feeling makes sense. Naming an attachment like this out loud can feel mortifying, and that hesitation is worth admitting rather than waiting until the words come out perfectly.

For now, the two feelings share the room. Nothing about tonight requires you to settle which one gets to stay.

It can feel ridiculous and still be the truest grief you have carried in a long time.