Swiping at a smudge on the glass, I didn’t notice the software had updated, forcing the camera to default to ‘on’ the moment the link was clicked. There I was, framed in a stark blue light: unwashed hair, a sweatshirt that has seen 3 consecutive winters, and a face that looked every bit like a grief counselor who had spent 43 hours absorbing the heaviness of other people’s ghosts. It was a 3:03 PM meeting with the regional board, and before I could scramble for the plastic slider, 13 faces stared back at me in high definition. This is the core frustration of being a human in the digital age-the terrifying lack of a buffer between our private disintegration and our public performance. We are expected to be polished, even when we are dealing with the most unpolished reality of all: the fact that things end, people leave, and the hole they leave behind doesn’t have a standardized shape.

I’ve been doing this for 23 years, and yet the sight of my own vulnerability on that screen felt like a betrayal of my professional mask. We live in a culture that treats grief like a bug in the software, a temporary glitch that can be patched with 13 steps or 3 weeks of bereavement leave. The pressure to ‘get over it’ is actually a pressure to ‘hide it better.’ I see 3 clients a day who come in apologizing for crying, as if their tears are a violation of some unspoken contract of efficiency. They want a timeline. They want to know when they can return to being the person they were before the 13th of October or the 3rd of June. But the contrarian truth-the one I’ve been trying to articulate for 13 years-is that you don’t heal from grief. You grow around it. It is not a tumor to be excised; it is a landscape you move into. You are the same person, but the map has changed, and 83 percent of the landmarks you once relied on have been swallowed by the sea.

There is this ridiculous idea that we should be ‘balanced’ in our mourning. I remember a woman who lost her husband after 53 years of marriage. She came to see me 3 times a week because her children were worried she wasn’t ‘moving on.’ She was 73 years old. Why on earth would she move on? She was living in the architecture of a half-century of shared breakfasts and 13,003 inside jokes. To ask her to find ‘closure’ is to ask her to demolish her own soul. We have weaponized the concept of closure to make the living feel more comfortable around the grieving. If you are ‘closed,’ you are quiet. If you are quiet, we don’t have to witness the 3:00 AM terror that lives in the marrow of your bones. I told her to stop trying to be balanced and start being honest. We spent 43 minutes just sitting in silence, which is a rare currency in a world that demands 13-minute TED talks on how to solve your existential dread.

I often find myself thinking about the physical weight of memory. Sometimes it feels like I’m carrying 123 pounds of wet wool in my chest. I think about this particularly when I’m doing mundane things, like the time I realized I hadn’t seen a doctor or a dentist in 3 years because I was too busy holding other people’s hands. It’s the strange irony of caregiving; you neglect the vessel because you’re so focused on the contents. I remember walking past a building and seeing the sign for a dental clinic in BC and thinking about how teeth are the only part of our skeleton that we see every day. They are durable, yet they require constant maintenance to stay in place. Grief is like that too. It’s structural. If you don’t tend to the foundation, the whole thing starts to lean. We need those mundane anchors-the dental appointments, the 3-minute showers, the 13-block walks-to keep us tethered to the physical world while the emotional world is spinning at 3,333 rotations per minute.

There’s a specific kind of silence that happens after a funeral, usually about 33 days later, when the casseroles stop arriving and the phone calls drop to 3 a week. That’s when the real work begins. That’s when the silence starts to scream. I’ve noticed that people tend to buy 13 different self-help books during this period, searching for a phrase that will make the 43rd night of sleeping alone feel less like an Arctic expedition. But language often fails here. I once spent 133 dollars on a fancy fountain pen because I thought if I wrote my feelings in beautiful ink, they would become beautiful feelings. They didn’t. They were still messy, ink-stained screams. I realized then that my job isn’t to provide the pen; it’s to sit in the ink with them.

Sometimes I wander off on tangents during my sessions, which is a habit I picked up 23 years ago from an old mentor who believed that the shortest distance between two people is a story that doesn’t seem to have a point. I’ll start talking about the way the light hits the trees in the 3rd week of November, or the specific smell of 3-day-old rain on hot pavement. These digressions are not fillers; they are breathing room. They are the 13 seconds of air you need before you dive back into the depths. My clients often find more solace in these strange, wandering observations than in any of the 33 clinical techniques I’m certified to use. It’s the human element-the accidental camera being left on-that actually builds the bridge. We are all just terrified children looking for 3 reasons to keep going when the 4th reason has been taken away.

I admit, I make mistakes. I once scheduled 3 people for the same 3:33 PM slot because I was distracted by a bird that kept hitting my window-13 times it hit the glass, a rhythmic thud that sounded like a heartbeat. I felt terrible, of course, but that mistake led to those 3 strangers sitting in my waiting room and realizing they were all wearing the same shade of mourning blue. They started talking. By the time I came out, they had exchanged numbers. It was a $163 mistake in terms of lost time and professional ego, but it was a million-dollar moment for them. This is the contradiction of my life: the more I try to control the process, the more I fail. The more I let the camera stay on and show the mess, the more people trust me.

We need to stop talking about ‘recovery.’ You don’t recover from a person. You aren’t a patient with a 13 percent chance of survival; you are a survivor with a 103 percent chance of continuing to feel. The data on this is quite clear, though we ignore it: grief doesn’t shrink, we just grow bigger to accommodate it. If the grief is 3 inches wide, we eventually become a room that is 13 feet wide, then a house that is 33 rooms wide. The grief stays the same size, but it no longer takes up the whole space. I tell my students that if they try to shrink a client’s grief, they are actually shrinking the client. They are telling the client that their love was only worth 3 months of sadness, which is an insult to the 43 years they spent building a life together.

I’m looking at the clock now. It’s 4:03 PM. I have 13 more minutes before my next call, and I find myself wondering if I should apologize for the camera incident. I think about the 33 people who saw me in my ‘un-consultant’ state. Maybe I should send an email. Or maybe I should just let it be. There is a certain power in being seen when you aren’t ready. It’s the only time we are actually real. I think about the 3 virtues of the stoics and how they probably would have hated my messy desk, but then I remember that even Marcus Aurelius probably had 13 bad days for every good one. We are all just trying to manage the 3 pounds of grey matter in our heads that won’t stop reminding us of what we’ve lost.

In the end, what does it matter if the camera is on or off? The 13 people on that call have their own ghosts. One of them is likely thinking about a parent they lost 23 years ago. Another is wondering why their 13-year-old child won’t talk to them. We are a collection of walking wounds, and the only thing that makes it bearable is the occasional 3-second glance of recognition from someone else who is also bleeding. I’m going to leave the slider open for the next call. I’m going to let them see the 3 stacks of books on my floor and the way I rub my temples every 13 minutes. It’s not professional, but it’s 103 percent honest. And honestly, in a world that is $333 trillion in debt to the truth, a little bit of honesty is the only currency that still carries any weight. We are here, we are hurting, and we are going to keep showing up, even if we forget to check the settings on our lives before we press ‘join.'”