The side effects of grief.

Until I lost Mike I don’t think I quite realised what an all-encompassing physical and mental experience grief is. People talk about being “hit by grief” and that’s such a good analogy because it’s exactly how it feels – like you’ve punched in the gut, kicked and beaten until the wind is knocked out of you and you’re left bruised and battered, immobilised. Certainly in the immediate aftermath, I found my whole body ached – it was hard to move, I was often in physical pain, I was oversensitive to touch.

But there’s longer-lasting physical and mental effects too. And that’s what I wasn’t expecting. I anticipated the emotional aftermath – the sadness, the triggers, the anxiety, the anguish, the depression – but I had no idea that I would be so impacted in other ways, too.

Here are some of the impacts that I’ve noticed.

My hair and skin have gone haywire. As someone who has spent her entire adult life with untameable curly hair it has been pretty shocking to find that my hair has just… stopped being curly. Now I have to try and tempt a curl into it, with curl activators and mousses and leave in conditioners. And my skin – generally clear and smooth – has become incredibly blemish-prone, rough-textured, dull and somehow both dry and oily at the same time. I feel I’ve aged ten years in six months.

I have zero memory. Mike would be laughing at this one as my memory was already notoriously bad (I once forgot an entire holiday we had been on and it took 20 minutes and Mike reminding me of a very traumatic rollercoaster experience for me to remember it) but since he died it has got even worse. I have to write everything down or I forget it. And often I then forget to look at the things I’ve written down. I hate this because it’s making work even harder, and resulting in me being a flaky friend which makes me feel really shit.

I’m so, SO tired. I don’t mean, like, can’t-be-bothered or fancy-a-lie-in tired. I mean the kind of tired where I need a nap most days, where if I don’t get into bed and fall asleep for a couple of hours I can’t function, where my brain goes fuzzy and I can’t think about anything other than getting some sleep.

But I can’t fall asleep. I’m regularly awake until 2, 3am. It is horrendous.

I’m more sensitive to temperature. I’ve always loved sleeping in a cold room with the thinnest duvet possible. But now I find myself turning on my portable radiator and adding extra blankets because I’m shivering even in double-digits.

I get migraines. I’ve never really had migraines before, besides a couple when I was pregnant and a few after that. But now I’d say I get on average one a week,. Thankfully they’re usually overnight so I just wake up feeling groggy with a headache, but they’re horrible nonetheless.

I get faint spells. I’ve very rarely felt faint in my life, but since Mike died I’ve had quite a few occasions where I’ve had to sit down with my head between my knees and two instances where I absolutely was convinced I was about to faint and had to call for Jonny and Heather. One of them I ended up on the floor and I absolutely could not get up, and the second everything went black and my ears rang for ages afterwards. It was horrible.

I would love to hear about your own experiences with the “side effects” of grief – the one thing I’ve learned is that you’re never alone in grief and someone else has always experienced the same thing. It is a weird dichotomy of a thing, grief – both incredibly lonely but also comfortingly unifying.

And really fucking bad for the complexion.