Your Thursday Three Things for 22 January, 2026

Grief Isn’t Weakness. It’s Unprocessed Energy.

I didn’t know how bad I was at grief until I tried to outrun it. I told myself I was fine. I stayed busy. I stayed useful. I stayed quiet. I thought that was strength. It wasn’t. It was avoidance dressed up as discipline, and it caught up with me anyway.

  This builds directly on something I had to admit last week. The lie of self-reliance. The idea that if I don’t need anyone, I’ll be safer. Cleaner. Less exposed. I bought into that lie early and I wore it like armor. Turns out armor gets heavy when you never take it off.

  When I lose something or someone, my instinct is to fix. Work more. Train harder. Be needed. If I just stay in motion, maybe I won’t have to feel it. That’s what I used to believe. I was wrong. All that motion just gave the grief a place to hide. It didn’t go away. It went underground.

  There’s a version of grief nobody warned me about. Not the crying on the floor kind. The tight jaw. The short fuse. The feeling that something is off but I can’t name it. The way sleep gets thin and shallow. The way small things start to piss me off more than they should. I didn’t call that grief. I called it stress. Or fatigue. Or just life.

  Here’s the part I don’t love admitting. I judged men who fell apart. I thought they lacked discipline or resilience. Then I realized I was falling apart too. Just more quietly. Just in ways that looked productive from the outside. Self-reliance didn’t save me. It just made sure no one saw it happening.

  Nobody ever sat me down and said, grief lives in your body whether you like it or not. Nobody said you can’t think your way out of it. You can’t outwork it. You can’t white knuckle your way through it without paying some kind of price later. I learned that the hard way. Alone. Like I thought I was supposed to.

  I keep coming back to this image because it’s gross but it’s accurate. Grief is like swallowing acid. You don’t get to pretend it didn’t happen. You don’t get to store it safely somewhere. It burns until you digest it. And digestion takes time and movement and discomfort. Not insight. Not motivation speeches. Not doing it by yourself.

  Most men I know don’t need another explanation. They need permission. Permission to admit that what they’re carrying is heavy. Permission to stop pretending they’re fine when they’re not. Permission to let someone else see it without feeling like they failed at being a man.

  I used to believe that time healed this stuff. That’s bullshit. Time just passes. What changes anything is effort. The right kind of effort. Not more force. More honesty. More willingness to stay with what’s actually happening instead of what I wish was happening. And sometimes that honesty requires another person in the room.

  One of the things that shifted this for me was realizing how much grief sits below the neck. Tight chest. Clenched hands. Shallow breath. That constant hum of tension I thought was normal. It wasn’t. It was unprocessed emotion with nowhere to go. Self-reliance gave it nowhere to go.

  There’s a simple thing I come back to when I’m spun up. I exhale all the way. Longer than feels comfortable. Then I inhale slow through my nose. I hold it for a few seconds. Then I let it out even slower. I do that a few times. That’s it. No candles. No mantras. Just breathing like I mean it. Sometimes it helps. Sometimes it just keeps me from making it worse. I’ll take that.

  I don’t believe grief makes you stronger. I think that’s a lazy phrase. What it does is change you. Whether you want it to or not. You don’t go back to who you were. You either let it harden you or you learn how to carry it without letting it run your life. I’m still figuring that part out. And I’m finally honest about the fact that I don’t figure it out alone.

  This week on Men Talking Mindfulness, we sat down with Michelle Ann Collins. She’s lived through losses most people can’t imagine and she doesn’t talk about grief like a therapist reading a script. She talks about it like someone who’s been in the dark and found a few lights that actually work. We get into body based tools, the stuff men actually use, and why trying harder and doing it solo usually backfires.

  If you want to watch the conversation, it’s here.

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  If you’d rather listen, it’s here.

  [https://pod.fo/e/37bc9b](https://pod.fo/e/37bc9b)

  I’m not promising answers. We didn’t wrap anything up neatly. We just told the truth and let it sit there.