The Feeling Griefy podcast!

This blog is slightly different than normal, as it is introducing something else I have been working on… a podcast!  It’s something I feel nervous to share because it’s really quite personal, but it’s also something I am proud to share. Because it is an attempt to explore the nitty gritty of grief. The minutiae of a feeling I wanted to google after my Mum died when I was 20, and it dawned on me that I even though I was technically ‘grieving’, I had no idea what that actually meant.

podcast thumbnail lino print designed by amelia Mccurdy (inspired by my coffee and croissant moments for mum)

Was the low I felt in the quiet moments walking back from the tube or on my way to the shops grief? Or was it only really grief if I was crying and thinking of Mum? If I went out with friends the month after Mum died, did that mean I didn’t miss my Mum enough? Or was I being too detached with my feelings that everything would come back to bite me in years to come? What was a product of my grief, or a product of being in my early twenties when a lot was changing already?

In the same way falling in love can distort other feelings and make you feel like a different person, grief can do it too. It can make you grief sick. It can make you feel like a stranger to yourself. It distorts your senses and muddles your mind. However, unlike love, and the multitude of songs, books, poems and films we have about this huge umbrella of a feeling, there isn’t much for grief. And grief is also an umbrella of a feeling. It mixes with all our life experiences and outputs something we weren’t always anticipating. Like washing new clothes for the first time, everything feels different afterwards.

me and patrick !

To keep going with the falling-in-love analogy, imagine after obsessively thinking about someone in those early days of a relationship, you don’t know whether that’s normal or a sign of madness. Or if the butterflies you get from a text are excitement, unease or even a tummy bug (I’m stretching this I know). What I am trying to say is that when we know the different shapes and sizes of an experience and the colours of feeling it brings, we are less inclined to overthink it. It becomes more normal. More expected. This doesn’t take away from the intensity of the feeling. Knowing your finger might bleed and sting after cutting it doesn’t make it hurt less. It just makes it a bit less scary.

This was why I wanted to start a podcast. I wanted to be able to be able to explore how the experiences in your twenties are warped and distorted as a result of grief. How feeling griefy intertwines with friendships and interferes with work. How grief can influence relationships and breakups.  Because grief demands vulnerability and so do relationships and at times, this can be a tricky one to navigate. I also wanted to talk more about death, because this is something we don’t hear about. One of the reasons I didn’t talk about death with Mum was because I thought it would make it happen faster. That simply by talking about life after Mum, we would be accepting fate and giving up. Which is completely and utterly wrong.

I couldn’t write a blog and not include a picture of my beautiful mum

Together with one of my best friends Patrick (who also happens to be a radio producer and knows how to make a podcast!) I attempt to explore what is under this umbrella of grief…

We laugh, I cry and we drink tea.

Here is the first, short, introductory episode. This episode introduces the whole ‘Feeling Griefy’ series. We talk about why I decided to start a podcast, what ‘feeling griefy’ even means and why my thumbnail is a coffee and a croissant. I even go on a tangent about how to make my Mum the perfect cup of tea.

I’ll be releasing the other 5 episodes altogether next week.  If you ‘follow’ the podcast series, it will tell you when the episodes have been released – I think…!

I want to post a few pics to go with each episode, so have also made an Instagram account (for the first time!) - you can follow me here.

I hope you like it xx