This may seem like a traumatic story all by itself. A 13-year-old girl with severe anxiety loses her mom to alcoholism in the midst of quarantine. She starts doing virtual therapy every week to work through this trauma. Everyone around her expects her to be weak. They expect her to sob uncontrollably when she hears the news. They expect her to crumble with every mention of her mother. She is dealing with grief while the kids around her are dealing with the boredom of quarantine. All people can see is the poor girl who lost her mother. She must be devastated. How will she ever get through this? She is growing into a woman who tells this story in the third person, hoping it will put it further back in her mind.

A child with trauma is supposed to be weak and frail. Whenever I mentioned that my mom died, I was consoled and people- especially adults- couldn’t believe that I could make it through that. They expected me to whimper when talking about my mom. They expected me to need weeks of grief. Other kids with deceased loved ones visited their counselors on a regular basis. They would weep at school and push away their friends. They would sit lonely in the back of the classroom when they returned to school. As grieving children, we were and still are expected to be broken. Those who were and are broken tend to be pitied more and evade work.

I would not be pitied. I was hardworking through it all. I was perseverant. I was strong. I was sincere. I found joy in the darkness. I found joy in the people around me who tried to lift my spirits in the darkest time of my life. I found joy in simple YouTube videos that I watched to laugh. I found joy in therapy. I found joy in the donuts that my dad got my sister and I in our week of grief. Most of all, I found joy in seeing my maternal grandparents who I had not seen in years and the flowers that were endlessly flooding my home. I tried to find joy in everything around me to dull the pain. I did allow myself to feel the pain because “pain demands to be felt” (The Fault in Our Stars by John Green). I was trying to grieve beautifully.