am I grieving?

“beware the easy griefs/that fool and fuel nothing”

I told my therapist (yes, niggas go to therapy) that I felt as though I’ve been grieving the past few months. No one in my life has died in quite some time. My therapist nodded, looked as though she understood, and suggested that I’m struggling to come to terms with my lack of control. But I believe it goes deeper. Maybe I’ve lost something irretrievable- so subtly I didn’t even realize- and with it, the ability to put myself in proper context.

Most writing about grief is about the emotional process, the necessary rituals, healing, or a diary-like collection of musings about trying to come to terms with the inevitable great losses all humans will experience over their lifetime. When I sat down to begin this piece, I realized I hadn’t done the internal reflection to write about my grief with true clarity, but I’m also too far removed from the inciting incidents to capture the granular day-to-day tidbits like Simone de Beauvoir in A Very Easy Death or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in Notes On Grief. I don’t even know what the inciting incident is or when it happened. Is grief my natural state? Had I been awaiting loss my whole life so I had an excuse to feel what’s always there? In this way, grief has a sort of anterior immediacy for me. All past events are brought into sharp focus as a temporal deception. I think of things as gone before they’ve left, the anticipation of absence as severe as absence. This effect is two-fold because the constant grieving has also diluted the experience for me: a half-measure of constancy on one hand and a lack of complete feeling on the other.

So far, 2026 has felt like 2020 for me. 2020 was a transformative year for everyone and has deep associations with grief. I’m no different. Lately, I’ve felt that same vague hollow sensation of near-paralyzing sadness I had in 2020 after Kobe Bryant died and then six weeks later, to a greater extent when my grandfather died. This too makes me feel like shit, because in a way I am elevating minute things and scaling them against actual tragedy. The complete inner death of self I’ve undergone leaves me unsure what to do with who I am now. I feel like a stranger to myself, living someone else’s life and all the things I do to take back control leave me alone and uninspired. In truth, I am alone, not just in NYC or for now or romantically, but in life.

At 2025’s close, I shared five reading recommendations and one was Sloane Crosley’s Grief Is For People. Crosley writes her way through having a family heirloom stolen from her home and losing her best friend through a seemingly sudden suicide. She doesn’t conflate these incidents so much as draw connections between how she feels about them. I joked it was a necessary read as someone who has “never gotten over anything in their life.” I told my therapist about Trae Young, my favorite player on my favorite team, being traded to the Washington Wizards and how it genuinely threw me into a depressive episode that had me eddying for days like I didn’t have much bigger problems. I talked about Alex Pretti, how watching ICE murder him on the street made me so angry it brought me to tears and I felt silly for thinking of my own “bigger problems.” I shared that I’m almost 30 and that I’ve always thought I’d be dead by now and now that it appears I’m going to live, I don’t know what to do with myself and my failures that hang to my skin like glitter. I don’t know what to think of my accomplishments that leave my mind easier than a mid-morning daydream.

On March 15, 2020, Childish Gambino dropped an album titled 03.15.2020 on his website. It was ten days after my grandpa died and a week before my 24th birthday. A week later, Childish Gambino on streaming platforms (on my actual birthday). None of the songs had actual titles and there was no cover art, the songs were great in my opinion but the lack of branding was a serious deviation from him artistically. He revealed years later that those tracks were unfinished and he put them out during a bout of grief, unable to work on them while processing his father’s death. In 2024, he finished the songs and re-released the album under the title Atavista. The title likely comes from the word “Atavistic” which means “relating to or characterized by reversion to something ancient or ancestral.” I’ve never seen any other musician do something like that, deciding to un-release an album that’d been out for years and re-do it. It broke all kinds of rules I wasn’t aware of and reminds me that it’s never too late to start over. Never.

My life has been rather difficult the past few years and I blame and resent myself for it. I try to help it, but I can’t. Everyone has told me I need more compassion for myself because I deserve it and I agree. But it doesn’t make it easier. It’s like my internal regulation has gone haywire and I’ve lost all ability to delineate between mountains and molehills, all loss feels total and every setback devastating. I feel weak and I used to be so strong. And I hate when niggas talk about what they used to be.

I cut all the hair off my head a few weeks ago, unprompted and on a whim. Everyone who knows me thought it strange because I’m a relatively vain man and I often joke about how male pattern baldness and being bald is a fate worse than death (for me). So why had I decided to tempt it, to brave it under no pressure? I can’t even begin to tell you. But afterwards, ideas started to form in my mind about focus or Hajj or new beginnings or morning or new energy and whatever else, betraying my vanity to see myself more clearly? It’s just hair? I’m going through everything, no I’m not ok because I’m never ok? Richie Tenenbaum getting a shave, how alone, how magnificent, how daring.

The subtitle to this essay is from the poet, Gwendolyn Brooks:

beware the easy griefs

that fool and fuel nothing

All I have are easy griefs but I need to let them go. Being real with myself, assessing what I can and what I want to do. Make decisions with what I can control. I think of Jim Starlin’s 1982 epic, Death of Captain Marvel and how Mar-Vell told Thanos he no longer needed “the illusion” when he was accepting his death. I accepted my death a long time ago. Life: continuing, persevering, restarting… letting go of what “should’ve been” and embracing what is. I tell myself I need no illusions but I don’t know if it’s true. Potential is perpetual, almost is forever. I’ll be damned if I died grieving a life I should’ve been living. No fear, no fear, no fear.