Stephanie Williams

“We need to talk about the hierarchy of grief. You hear it all the time—no grief is worse than any other. I don’t think that’s one bit true. There is a hierarchy of grief. Divorce is not the same as the death of a partner. Death of a grandparent is not
the same as the death of a child. Losing your job is not the same as losing a limb.

Here’s the thing: every loss is valid. And every loss is not the same. You can’t flatten the landscape of grief and say that
everything is equal. It isn’t.

It’s easier to see when we take it out of the intensely personal: stubbing your toe hurts. It totally hurts. For a moment, the pain can be all-consuming. You might even hobble for a while. Having your foot ripped off by a passing
freight train hurts, too. Differently. The pain lasts longer. The injury needs recovery time, which may be uncertain or complicated. It affects and impacts your life moving forward. You can’t go back to the life you had before you became a
one-footed person. No one would say these two injuries are exactly the same.”
― Megan Devine, It's OK That You're Not OK

“Spiritual bypassing—the use of spiritual beliefs to avoid dealing with painful feelings, unresolved wounds, and developmental needs—is so pervasive that it goes largely unnoticed. The spiritual ideals of any tradition, whether Christian commandments or Buddhist precepts, can provide easy justification for practitioners to duck uncomfortable feelings in favor of more seemingly enlightened activity. When split off from fundamental psychological needs, such actions often do much more harm than good. ROBERT AUGUSTUS MASTERS, Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us from What Really Matters”
― Megan Devine, It's OK That You're Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn't Understand

“Aristotle said a bunch of stuff that was wrong. Galileo and Newton fixed things up. Then Einstein broke everything again. Now, we’ve basically got it all worked out, except for small stuff, big stuff, hot stuff, cold stuff, fast stuff, heavy stuff, dark stuff, turbulence, and the concept of time”
― Zach Weinersmith, Science: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness