I found the grief, and it was more than I thought

Two months ago, I started grazing at the edges of grief. I didn’t know its full shape yet—only that it was there, pressing against the walls of my body, waiting, demanding to be seen.

The idea of frozen terror was something I understood intellectually. I had the language for it. I had the tools—EMDR, somatic work, psychodrama. And yet, it remained inaccessible. My body wasn’t ready.

There’s a reason it stays frozen. It is annihilation energy. To touch it too soon would be to risk implosion.

So when a friend suggested I join her at a grief retreat, I said no. A dozen no’s, in fact. I wasn’t ready to stand at that threshold. Instead, I signed up for an online course. See? I’m doing the work. It was the kind of grief work I could manage—contained, structured, safe for my nervous system at the time.

The course was great.

And—it only let me graze the edges.

Superman & The Glitch

I’ve carried this weight for so long, I almost forgot it was there. The Superman complex—the belief that I must bear it all, alone. That no one else can hold this. That I must keep going.

The problem with carrying immense weight is that it starts to distort reality. Or maybe reality was already distorted, and my mind simply glitched to compensate.

But grief has a way of making itself known. It seeps through the cracks of our carefully constructed selves. It demands to be witnessed.

So I finally said yes.

The Unseen Rage

I won’t write about what happened at the grief retreat. Some things are meant for the altar, the soul space, a private offering swept away by the waters.

But I will say this: I found where grief lived in my body.

I always knew about the ache—a dark void above my heart. But I never knew what lay behind it. It wasn’t just sorrow. It was rage.

The left scapula. That’s where it hid, unseen, for decades. The annihilation energy of war.

When my friend pressed on that spot, I curled up in terror.

“I can hear the sounds of burning flesh. They all died. They’re all gone.”

That—lived in my body.

That—walked with me into corporate meetings, sat with me at the dinner table, rose with me in the morning, lurked wen I baked sourdough bread with my wife.

Unseen. Unspoken. Always there.

Deeper into the abyss I go

A year later, I’m off again—to Alaska, right up to the threshold, to yet another layer of unraveling, in a ketamine-assisted psychotherapy retreat.

I hold so much compassion for my past self now. He carried so much pain, so much weight. He coped the way many of us do—numbing through distraction, filling the void with things. The pile of camera gear, the abandoned social media accounts, the endless doom scrolling, the other vices too heavy to name here. Each one, an attempt to escape.

But when I let myself be vulnerable—when I stepped into the work—I saw that I wasn’t alone. I never was. Just blind to those right in front of me.