The Ness was created as a quieter space within Belfast Times: a place for wellness-led features, gentle reflections, and stories that take their time. It wasn’t built from trends or strategy. It came from something much more personal: a real need for my own wellbeing, and a slow realisation that sometimes the only way forward is to soften the pace and start again in smaller ways. Part of the reason why my socials have changed recently (and you’ve noticed) and the @beinbelfast instagram was born.
Since 2021, I’ve lost both my parents, and my brother too. I don’t share that for sympathy, but because it’s shaped everything about the way I see the world now…the pace, the noise, the small things… the way time can move forward while your heart stays somewhere else entirely.
Sometimes it feels like I’m living in an “after” that I didn’t choose; a version of life that keeps moving forward while I’m still trying to understand what happened. There’s a lot to unpack. It’s a whole life I’ve lived: a lifetime of memories, love, communication, and talking things through. A whole support network all gone, one after the other, year after year.
I feel lost, and sometimes even confused. Not in a dramatic way… though maybe it is dramatic, it certainly has been. Lost in the quiet way that settles into your brain. Lost in the way you can still get dressed, still reply to messages, still do what needs done… but none of it feels connected to who you used to be. Life simply doesn’t feel the same anymore.
People often talk about grief like something you learn to carry, still there, but with new layers built around it. But for me it hasn’t been like that, because the new layers are new layers of loss. For now it’s smaller, sharper moments that arrive without warning. A song. A smell. A photo you weren’t ready for. A comment from someone and it takes your breath away. A normal day that suddenly feels heavier because you remember who isn’t in it anymore. A life-changing impact that can hit as hard as the day it happened.
Most days, I look completely fine. I can laugh. I can work. I can make plans. But it’s always there…that this is real (even when it doesn’t feel real), and it’s permanent, and nothing can undo it.
There is a particular loneliness to grief that people don’t always talk about. Not the loneliness of being physically alone, but the loneliness of realising that the world you understood has shifted. That what once felt familiar now feels different, and that “normal” may never look the same again.
I don’t feel the same anymore. Life doesn’t feel the same…not naturally, not easily.
I don’t have a neat lesson from it. I don’t have a silver lining yet. I only know that love doesn’t disappear, it stays, even when the people you love are gone. And learning to live with that absence is its own kind of hard work.
If you’re carrying loss too, the kind that changes your whole world, I just want to say: I understand. You’re not weak. You’re not even depressed. You’re not doing grief wrong.
You’re just grieving.
And you’re not alone. 🤍
