It's really interesting that you brought up grief in this broader sense, not just tied to death, but to any loss of familiarity or rhythm. It made me think about how differently grief is understood and expressed across cultures. In Western contexts, grief is often framed as a deep internal process, something you sit with, work through, and eventually heal from over time. But in other cultures, the emotional vocabulary for grief isn’t always carved out in the same way.
Take Chinese, for instance. Words like 悲痛 or 哀伤 express sorrow or mourning, but they're often tied to specific events like death, and used in more formal or external contexts. There isn't really a direct everyday equivalent to "grief" that captures the kind of internal, psychological healing journey you're describing. Emotional experiences like grief are often folded into broader ideas of hardship or endurance, and aren't always named or processed as a distinct, lingering state.
It makes me wonder how much our ability to name a feeling shapes our experience of it. If we don’t have a word for this quieter, long-tail grief, the kind that comes from lost routines or friendships, do we still feel it the same way? Or do we move past it differently, because the culture doesn’t hold space for it in the same language? Some food for thoughts 💭
Thank you for reading and commenting, Kira! Really enjoyed hearing your thoughts on the piece <3
It's definitely the case that language shapes our reality and vice versa. Even in English, I don't think that most people would define "grief" in the same way that I quoted in the article — they'd still likely associate it with an external event like death, similar to the Chinese words you mentioned. In my experience, in both Western and Eastern cultures, people avoid grief and do not know what to do with it, but this phenomenon might be even more extreme in the East. It's rare for Chinese people to talk openly about grief or sadness, if at all. There isn't much language for it, as you mentioned, and culturally people just don't do it. It's like a "don't ask, don't tell" type of situation. Still, I think grief is a normal, human emotion that we have all felt, but maybe some languages are more well-equipped with words to capture it.
No matter the case, I think it's up to us, the younger generation, to normalize grief and do our best to process it in a healthy way. If we can, we'll be able to show up as fully as possible for the people we care about and avoid passing down more generational trauma.
It's really interesting that you brought up grief in this broader sense, not just tied to death, but to any loss of familiarity or rhythm. It made me think about how differently grief is understood and expressed across cultures. In Western contexts, grief is often framed as a deep internal process, something you sit with, work through, and eventually heal from over time. But in other cultures, the emotional vocabulary for grief isn’t always carved out in the same way.
Take Chinese, for instance. Words like 悲痛 or 哀伤 express sorrow or mourning, but they're often tied to specific events like death, and used in more formal or external contexts. There isn't really a direct everyday equivalent to "grief" that captures the kind of internal, psychological healing journey you're describing. Emotional experiences like grief are often folded into broader ideas of hardship or endurance, and aren't always named or processed as a distinct, lingering state.
It makes me wonder how much our ability to name a feeling shapes our experience of it. If we don’t have a word for this quieter, long-tail grief, the kind that comes from lost routines or friendships, do we still feel it the same way? Or do we move past it differently, because the culture doesn’t hold space for it in the same language? Some food for thoughts 💭
Thank you for reading and commenting, Kira! Really enjoyed hearing your thoughts on the piece <3
It's definitely the case that language shapes our reality and vice versa. Even in English, I don't think that most people would define "grief" in the same way that I quoted in the article — they'd still likely associate it with an external event like death, similar to the Chinese words you mentioned. In my experience, in both Western and Eastern cultures, people avoid grief and do not know what to do with it, but this phenomenon might be even more extreme in the East. It's rare for Chinese people to talk openly about grief or sadness, if at all. There isn't much language for it, as you mentioned, and culturally people just don't do it. It's like a "don't ask, don't tell" type of situation. Still, I think grief is a normal, human emotion that we have all felt, but maybe some languages are more well-equipped with words to capture it.
No matter the case, I think it's up to us, the younger generation, to normalize grief and do our best to process it in a healthy way. If we can, we'll be able to show up as fully as possible for the people we care about and avoid passing down more generational trauma.
💖💖💖