Sharing my grief as a new hobby?

Im bored, full of grief and want to share some of it to the world. I recently rediscovered again that stress can produce an autoimmune disease. I’m not sure if this classifies as an autoimmune disease but I have eczema and lately she has been FLARING!!!! The worst part of it all, it’s on my face so in Gen-z tiktok lingo, my  face card has been declining lately.

Thank God I believe in modern medicine,  being born in the 21st century and having student insurance , I was able to visit a dermatologist to get myself checked. Besides that , I took a class on the Psychology and neurobiology of stress and learned that excess cortisol triggers an immune response, causing our immune system to go into overdrive. Of course that is common knowledge but( I might be wrong in this), our immune system releases this signal that causes it to remember the stress our body has been through rather than refreshing the page and starting anew.  This takes me back to 2021 when I lost my dad. I was 17 when he passed and kept all the grief inside me and I deeply suffered the consequences of that. Pimples, patches of eczema, etc etc, my body was a wreck. 

Recently, I lost a close friend of 10 years and I’ve been going through the five+ stages of grief while also dealing with an insurmountable amount of stress from school and grieving. I say “five+” because 1) I don’t believe grief can be reduced to something formulaic or neatly organized 2) grief cannot be conceptualized into five different stages and 3) it puts grieving, and the process of it all, into a box and almost makes it feel like a benchmark you have to complete in order to bounce back to your old self.

When in reality, after loss like that, you never really return to normalcy. You just learn how to live around the absence. Normalcy dies when the person you love dies too. With that being said, I’m not going to repeat the cycle I went through when I lost my dad. I refuse to hurt alone and in silence. I’m sharing my grief with the world, making it into my new hobby if you will. Because grieving is a collective act and shouldn’t  be an isolated action. And putting this into words is helping me understand that i am not alone.