Grief and reduced appetite together — how I built a floor

The thing nobody warned me about was that it comes back. Not steadily. In waves, months later, over nothing in particular.

What I would say is that this is not the time to be strict with yourself about anything. Mine was, for two months, and it cost me.

My grief made everything else harder to judge. I could not tell what was a symptom and what was simply what March was like that year.

What I found hardest was people asking how I was in a way that required a manageable answer.

My experience is that routine helped more than anything anybody said. Small, repeated, unremarkable things, done at the same times.

Somebody in this circle sat with me on a thread for an evening and said almost nothing and it was exactly what I needed.

Eating went completely for about a fortnight and my GP was more concerned about that than I was, and she was right to be.

No wisdom, just: I am sorry. That sounds genuinely hard.

Coming back a year on to say that eating is ordinary again, that the grief is not gone, and that both of those things can be true.

Reading this properly rather than skimming, which is all I have to offer today.

Six weeks in was harder than the first week for me. Everybody had gone back to their lives and I was still in mine.

Anniversaries are their own thing and I now put them in the calendar deliberately so they do not ambush me.

I had to tell my prescriber what had happened, and I nearly did not, and it changed the whole conversation for the better.