Everyone Is Carrying Something
The question is not what we carry, but whether we are held while carrying it...
In 2017 I lost two people I loved in the same year.
My grandmother — the woman who left Vietnam before the fall, who sponsored my family out of the Singapore camps, who called me her brave and beautiful granddaughter every time we met until she was 77 — was gone.
And a soul sister. My partner. Suddenly. By her own hand.
I don’t have clean words for what that year felt like. I’m not sure clean words exist for it. What I know is that I kept moving. Faster, if anything. Filling the silence with work, with mission, with the particular busyness that looks like strength from the outside and is something else entirely from the inside.
And then my body stopped me.
A cough that wouldn’t leave. Months of it. My body doing what I wouldn’t do for myself — insisting on stillness. Insisting on the grief I had been outrunning.
I had no choice but to sit with it.
Grief is not linear. It doesn’t arrive once and then resolve. It descends — again and again, in waves, at unexpected hours, triggered by small things that shouldn’t matter and somehow matter completely.
What I learned in that stillness is that grief doesn’t want to be managed. It wants to be witnessed. It wants someone to stay in the room with it instead of offering solutions or timelines or the promise that it gets easier.
It does get easier. But not because you outrun it.
Because you finally stop.
I think about my soul sister often. The weight I carried after — not just grief but the particular heaviness of wondering. Of replaying. Of all the things I wish I had said or asked or noticed.
That kind of loss doesn’t resolve. You learn to carry it differently. You learn that some things don’t heal so much as they become part of how you move through the world — more slowly, more attentively, with less tolerance for leaving things unsaid.
She changed how I listen. She changed how I love. She changed what I think is worth saying out loud.
What I also learned is that grief moves through organizations the way it moves through bodies.
Unnamed. Quietly. Reshaping everything underneath while the surface keeps functioning.
I've sat with the council circles at Snapchat to learn — a space built intentionally for something most corporate environments don’t allow. Not a meeting. Not a debrief. A circle where people could name what they were actually carrying. Where grief had a container instead of a workaround.
What happened in that room was not soft. It was not a detour from the real work.
It was the real work.
We are in a moment of collective grief that most organizations are not naming.
Mass layoffs. Restructuring. AI reshaping entire industries and the identities built inside them. The particular fear of people who worked hard and did everything right and still don’t know what comes next.
This grief doesn’t announce itself in meetings. It moves through people quietly — in how they show up, in what they can’t access, in the distance that opens between colleagues who used to feel like a team.
Everyone is carrying something.
The question is whether the organization creates any space for that — or whether people are expected to carry it alone, invisibly, and still perform.
Leaders don’t need a perfect blueprint for this.
They need the willingness to pause. To ask how people actually are and mean it. To create enough safety that grief can be named instead of managed. To understand that acknowledging loss doesn’t diminish productivity — it restores the human connection that productivity depends on.
A check-in. A circle. A moment where someone says: this has been hard, and we don’t have to pretend otherwise.
That’s not weakness in a leader.
That’s the thing that makes people stay.
My grandmother called me brave and beautiful every time we met.
I didn’t know, when I last saw her, that it would be the last time.
I try to remember that now — in sessions, in rooms, in conversations where something important could be said or left unsaid. I try to say the thing. To stay present. To not leave anything important unspoken because I assumed there would be more time.
She taught me that without meaning to.
So did my soul sister.
Grief is a radical teacher.
It doesn’t wait for you to be ready.
But if you let it — if you stop running long enough to actually feel it — it gives you something back.
Not the people you lost.
Something quieter than that.
The knowledge of what actually matters.
And the courage to act like it does.
