Growing Around the Grief

Here is a beautiful psychological concept that visualizes grief as a heavy object inside a jar.

• In the beginning, the grief takes up the entire jar. Every time you move, you bump into it. It feels impossible to ignore.

• As time goes on, the grief itself doesn’t actually shrink. It stays the exact same size.

• What changes is the jar. The jar grows bigger.

As you slowly begin to re-engage with the world, take on new routines, form new connections, and experience new moments of joy, your life expands. The grief is still there, completely intact, but it no longer occupies 100% of your emotional space. You can carry the sadness of what you lost while simultaneously holding room for the beauty of what is still here.

The Myth of the Linear Timeline

In 1969, a psychiatrist named Elisabeth Kübler-Ross introduced the world to the Five Stages of Grief:

Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance.

It was a brilliant framework, but over the decades, society completely misunderstood how it works. We began treating these stages like a corporate ladder or a school curriculum; assuming we start at Stage 1, work our way through to Stage 4, and graduate permanently into Stage 5.

But real human grief doesn’t play by those rules. It isn't a neat, linear checklist; it is a chaotic, unpredictable loop.

You don't move through the stages; you bounce around them.

• You might wake up on a Tuesday feeling a quiet sense of acceptance, only for a specific song on the radio at lunchtime to throw you right back into sharp, white-hot anger or deep denial.

• You might spend weeks in a heavy depression, pivot into bargaining ("if only I had done this differently..."), and then cycle back again.

Feeling multiple stages in a single afternoon—or skipping some entirely—isn't a sign that your healing has stalled. It is a sign that you are actively processing a profound reality shift. Grief isn't a mountain to climb and leave behind; it is a landscape you learn to live in.