Why I’m Building a Peer-Led Grief Conversation (And What It’s Actually For)
Why grief literacy belongs in our workplaces, institutions, and leadership cultures
Last week, I opened a peer-led conversation instead of publishing a written essay.
That choice wasn’t about changing formats. It was about naming a problem I keep seeing everywhere and refusing to keep working around it.
We talk about grief as if it’s a personal, private issue. Something to manage quietly, preferably without disrupting work, relationships, or momentum. When it does disrupt those things, the response is often the same: fix it, contain it, or move it somewhere else.
People are not self-absorbed, or selfish to express grief; in fact, grief is a natural emotion, a response to a life event, and it’s something we will all inevitably experience throughout life. Yet, the common response to grief is to treat it like an individual problem, one that causes too much discomfort for everyone else instead of a shared, cultural one that significantly impacts our productivity, performance and ability to focus.
Most people aren’t struggling because they can’t cope with loss. They’re struggling because the systems they move through—workplaces, schools, leadership structures—don’t know how to tolerate it. There’s no shared language. No literacy. No place for grief to land without becoming a liability.
So people go quiet. Or they over-explain. Or they disappear.
UNFIXED exists to interrupt that pattern.
This space isn’t therapy. It isn’t advice. And it isn’t about resolution. It’s a place to surface questions, test language, and sit with lived experience long enough to understand what’s actually breaking down around grief—not just inside individuals, but inside the cultures we participate in.
Peer-led matters here. Because grief doesn’t belong exclusively to professionals. It belongs to communities. To workplaces. To families. To leadership. We learn how to carry it by watching how others are allowed—or not allowed—to carry it.
What I’m building through UNFIXED is a thinking space. A place where reflection comes before solutions, and where emotional agency isn’t framed as self-improvement, but as cultural competence.
This work is moving toward helping professional and organizational spaces handle grief with more skill, less avoidance, and far fewer unspoken consequences. UNFIXED is where that thinking starts.
If you want to add your voice, you’re invited. These conversations start with you, me and the inevitability that we will all experience one day, if we haven’t already.
Today I’ll leave you with a question:
Where does grief go in the systems I’m part of and who pays the cost when it has nowhere to land?
