Grief is a tricky thing. Yes, this is going to sound like the monologue that runs through JD’s head in Scrubs. Grief, even the smallest little bit of it, can hurt a lot. We’re in a world where people only see the bad but they try to convince you that there is only good…it seems like we are always trying to pretend that life is perfect, wonderful and amazing all the time. Sometimes it’s not, and sometimes that’s actually okay.

I don’t want to make this all about me. But I have to for a second. I’m sitting here at 12:30am, knowing I have to be up at 5:30am, because I can’t stop thinking about something that happened today. Just know that we lost someone special in this world today. I realized that people are always struggling with more than we think below the surface.

It could be anything. It could be fear of inadequacy and failure. It could be fear of people disliking you. It could be a mental illness. It could very well be something you cannot see at all. As someone who’s had multiple concussions, and who has dealt with multiple athletes with concussions presenting in so many different ways…the things you can’t necessarily see are the scariest. They are also the most frustrating for the one who has it and the ones around them who don’t understand it. Concussions don’t even scrape the bottom of the barrel though, because those have required some sort of outward collision (or at the very least, your brain bounces off your skull) that are physical and somewhat easier to understand.

Sometimes there’s pain because the universe screws you over. Sometimes there’s pain because other people…