Rebellious Grief

After my mum died, something inside me cracked—but it didn’t show in the way people might have expected. I wasn’t lying in bed for days or crying in front of friends. I was out. Loud. Fast. Reckless.

I drank too much. I drove too fast. I laughed too loudly. I pretended I was fine.

Part 1: The Performance of Moving On

Grief can be a mask. Mine looked like parties, loud music, late nights, and a pint too many. I thought if I kept moving, I wouldn’t have to feel it. I didn’t want to be the person people pitied. I wanted to be the one who was “doing well”, “getting on with it”.

I wasn’t.

But I became very good at playing the part. I filled my life with noise. Chaos. Drama. Anything to avoid the silence she left behind.

Part 2: Risk as a Distraction

I pushed boundaries. Speed limits, social norms, sometimes my own friends. I did things I wouldn’t have before. It wasn’t about rebellion—it was about control. Or maybe the lack of it.

Everything in my world had been flipped upside down. My anchor was gone. So I leaned into the storm.

There’s something about grief that makes you feel invincible and fragile at the same time. Like nothing matters, but everything hurts. That’s a dangerous mix. I didn’t realise it then. I just thought I was blowing off steam.

The more I tried to bury the pain, the more disconnected I became from the people who truly cared about me. I started to push them away—not because I didn’t love them, but because I didn’t know how to let them in. Their concern felt like pressure. Their advice sounded like judgement. And I couldn’t bear the idea of being vulnerable.

Instead, I found myself drifting towards the wrong kinds of people. People who didn’t ask questions. People who didn’t care if I drank too much or acted like I didn’t care about anything. They suited the version of me that was trying so hard to forget.

Part 3: The Quiet Consequences

Of course, the sadness didn’t go away. It followed me home. It seeped into hangovers and split-second silences. It came back in the early hours, when the world slowed down and I was left alone with my thoughts.

I started to realise how far off course I’d gone. My relationships were strained. The things that used to ground me—music, family, even just quiet—felt foreign. I was still grieving, but now I was also tired. Tired of pretending, tired of running, tired of the ache underneath it all.

People told me I seemed “different.” I laughed it off. I had no language for what I was feeling. No one had ever taught me what to do with grief. So I turned it into something wild and unrecognisable.

It wasn’t all dark. I still smiled. I still loved. But underneath it, I was unravelling quietly.

Why I’m Writing This Now

Because this part of the story matters, too. The messy middle. The mistakes. The way grief doesn’t always look like sadness. Sometimes it looks like shouting into the night. Sometimes it looks like pretending you’re fine when you're nowhere near it.

If you’re going through something and finding yourself in self-destructive patterns, please know this: you’re not broken. You’re not beyond repair. You’re grieving.

This was how mine looked. Not graceful. Not poetic. But real.

Thanks for reading.