I Thought I Was Coping… I Was Avoiding.

In year one, grief was a demolition.

It didn’t ask permission. It didn’t negotiate. It just took over my body, my mind, my days. I didn’t need discipline or motivation because survival was automatic. I breathed because I had to. I ate because people reminded me. I got through the hours the way you get through bad weather, head down, shoulders braced, waiting for the worst of it to pass.

Year two is different.

Year two doesn’t always look like falling apart.

Sometimes it looks like productivity.

Sometimes it looks like focus. Vision. Output. Momentum. Plans. Projects. Growth. “She’s doing so well.”

Sometimes it looks like three books, a website, a platform, posts, emails, podcasts, launches, spreadsheets, drafts, revisions, ideas at midnight, more ideas at 3 a.m., more work because work is something I can control, when everything else is uncontrollable.

And for a while, I thought it was good. I told myself I was building something. I told myself I was honouring Kahlia. I told myself I was turning pain into purpose. I told myself I was coping.

But the truth is more complicated, and it’s harder to admit.

Some people feel grief in their bodies. I feel it in my behaviour.

I don’t collapse, I accelerate.

I don’t hibernate, I overwork.

I don’t slow down, I tighten my grip.

I don’t rest, I organise.

I don’t sit still, because stillness is where the reality waits.

The sharpest part, the part that makes my throat close just writing it, is this. Writing about Kahlia keeps me connected to her, yes. It keeps her alive in language. In memory. In the room with me, in some impossible way.

But it also keeps a certain kind of denial alive too. Not denial like I don’t know she’s dead, my mind knows.

Denial like, if I keep moving, I don’t have to fully feel what it means that she is not coming back.

Denial like, if I keep writing to her, for her, about her, it can almost trick my nervous system into believing this is still a relationship happening in real time, not a love I now carry alone.

Denial like, I can keep the world spinning fast enough that it doesn’t catch up with the truth.

And then a quiet moment arrives, and it all catches up anyway.

Because year two has a particular cruelty. The shock has worn off, the checking-in fades. People stop expecting tears. They stop saying their name. They start believing you’ve “processed it” because you can go to the supermarket without falling to the floor.

But your love hasn’t changed, and the fact of them being gone hasn’t changed.

What changes is the way you avoid it.

In year one, I was raw.

In year two, I can look functional while I’m secretly building a life around avoidance.

It’s not always intentional.

It’s not some calculated choice to refuse reality.

It’s a nervous system trying to protect me from a truth too heavy to carry all at once.

If I keep my hands busy, my brain busy, my calendar busy, then maybe I won’t have to sit in the silence where the thought lives, the one thought that turns the air to glass.

She is dead. I will never see her again. And no amount of writing, organising, producing, or achieving will change that.

That sentence is the cliff edge. Everything else is me building fences around it. And I want to say this gently, because I don’t believe this makes me weak or broken.

I think this is human.

Grief doesn’t only show up as sadness.

It shows up as control.

It shows up as busyness.

It shows up as over-committing, because saying yes keeps you from being alone with what hurts.

It shows up as taking on too much, because exhaustion is a kind of anaesthetic.

It shows up as constant input. Podcasts. Content. Noise. Planning. Fixing. Doing.

It shows up as “I’m fine,” said quickly, said brightly, said while your body is begging you to stop.

And it can be confusing, because from the outside it looks like strength. But from the inside it can feel like fleeing. Sometimes I wonder if I’m afraid that if I stop, I’ll be swallowed. That if I slow down, I’ll feel the full weight of her absence, and it will crush me.

So I make myself a moving target.

And here’s the part I’m still learning.

Rest is not resignation.

Stillness is not surrender.

Slowing down does not mean I’ve given up on her, or on us.

It doesn’t mean I’m “accepting” in the tidy way people like to imagine.

It means I’m letting the truth exist in the room without me immediately trying to outrun it.

It means I’m practising something that looks a lot like grief maturity, even though it feels like vulnerability.

I can love her fiercely and still put my laptop down.

I can miss her and still choose one small thing instead of ten big things.

I can be devoted without using devotion as a disguise for avoidance.

That’s the line I’m walking in year two. Not the line between sadness and healing. The line between love and overdrive.

Between connection and compulsion.

Between honouring and hiding.

Because yes, I’m building something, I am. I’m writing and creating and speaking because I want her story, and mine, and the truth about grief and suicide loss to be seen. But I also need to be honest about the cost.

If I’m not careful, I can turn my grief into a full-time job. Not because I’m passionate, but because I’m scared of the quiet.

So this is me noticing. This is me naming it. This is me saying, if you’re in year two and you feel restless, driven, over-busy, strangely agitated, unable to settle, unable to stop, you’re not failing grief.

You’re grieving. You’re just grieving in the form that doesn’t get recognised. And maybe, like me, you’re learning that you don’t have to earn rest. You don’t have to justify slowing down. You don’t have to prove your love by exhausting yourself.

Sometimes the bravest thing in year two is not doing more.

It’s sitting down.

It’s letting the silence arrive.

It’s letting the truth exist without immediately trying to turn it into something productive.

And if all you can do this week is notice your patterns, the way grief has dressed itself up as ambition, or productivity, or coping, that’s not nothing.

That’s a beginning. Because year two isn’t the year you “move on.” It’s the year you start seeing the ways you’ve been surviving, and deciding, slowly, gently, honestly, whether you want to keep surviving like that.