It''s OK That You''re Not OK

What if grief isn’t something to fix but something to live with? Megan Devine’s It’s OK That You’re Not OK begins with this radical question. As both a psychotherapist and a grieving partner who watched her beloved die in a drowning accident, Devine argues that our culture systematically fails people in grief by demanding they “move on.” She contends that grief is not a psychological disorder or a moral weakness—it’s a natural, love-infused response to loss. The problem isn’t our pain; it’s the world’s intolerance of it.

Drawing on her experience as both a clinician and a bereaved person, Devine exposes how society and even the helping professions misunderstand grief. She shows that “being okay” is not the goal. Instead, she maps out a new model of emotional literacy based on truth, compassion, and companionship—the idea that pain must be witnessed, not erased.

A Broken Cultural Story About Pain

Devine begins her exploration by pointing out that Western culture pathologizes normal human sorrow. When someone dies, our conversations quickly shift to healing, growth, or “finding meaning,” reflecting a deep discomfort with pain itself. We’ve been taught to believe that sad equals sick, that emotional intensity is evidence of instability. Grieving people are told they’re “stuck” if their sadness lasts longer than a few months—an attitude reinforced by the medicalization of grief, which now categorizes long-term mourning as a mental disorder. Devine argues this is not just incorrect; it’s cruel. It adds shame to sorrow.

Instead of acceptance, the bereaved encounter correction and dismissal. People say, “He’s in a better place” or “Everything happens for a reason,” hoping to bring comfort but instead invalidating the pain. Devine identifies the secret message behind those words: “Stop feeling so bad.” Her conclusion is both tender and defiant: pain needs acknowledgment, not advice.

From Fixing Pain to Tending Pain

The book dismantles what Devine calls our culture’s “mastery orientation”—the obsession with controlling emotions as if they were mechanical problems to solve. Instead, she urges readers to adopt a "mystery orientation": an attitude of reverence toward life’s complexities. Just as love can’t be solved, grief can’t be solved either. “Some things cannot be fixed,” she writes. “They can only be carried.” Her language directly recalls the paradoxical wisdom of Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön and grief pioneer Francis Weller, who also view suffering as something to be tended with awareness rather than resisted with false positivity.

Through vivid examples—like her own first trip to the grocery store after her partner’s death, when even bananas triggered tears—Devine shows how grief inhabits every corner of life. Emotional survival, she suggests, begins with permission to tell the truth: “This really is as bad as you think it is.” When we stop gaslighting ourselves, we might start learning how to live here, in reality, however painful it is.

The Real Purpose of the Book

It’s OK That You’re Not OK unfolds in four parts: understanding the broken cultural narratives about grief, learning to live with pain, navigating relationships when others don’t understand, and finding a way forward that honors the person you’ve lost. Throughout, Devine pairs clinical insight with storytelling drawn from her online “Writing Your Grief” community—a space where hundreds of bereaved people share raw reflections. These voices, often unfiltered and stark, illuminate the courage of ordinary heartbreak. They also illustrate Devine’s central message: validation is medicine.

By the end of the introduction, she makes the book’s mission clear: it’s not about fixing grief but restoring humanity to it. The goal is collective transformation—a culture where tenderness replaces toughness, where we stop asking people to “be positive” and start asking how we can stand beside them when life shatters. “We’re not here to fix our pain,” she writes. “We’re here to tend to it.” This shift—from cure to compassion—is the revolution at the heart of her message.

Why This Matters

Every one of us will face loss. Whether it’s death, illness, estrangement, or the unraveling of a life we thought secure, grief is universal. Yet we live in a culture allergic to sadness and obsessed with productivity. Devine’s work challenges us to see pain not as failure, but as evidence of our capacity to love. Like Mark Nepo writes in his foreword, “Real safety is in entering each other’s pain, recognizing ourselves inside it.”

Ultimately, this is a book about love: not the sentimental kind that rescues or redeems, but the fierce, enduring love that stays. It acknowledges horror, holds beauty, and says, “Yes, you are broken, and you are still here.” Through that simple truth, Devine reframes grief from a personal breakdown into a profound act of resistance against a culture terrified of feeling. Her message is both permission and protest: you are not meant to be okay, and that’s okay.

In the first full chapter, Megan Devine makes one thing unmistakably clear: the magnitude of loss cannot be minimized or transcended through slogans. “This really is as bad as you think,” she writes. Through that sentence, she cuts through every attempt to sugarcoat grief with spiritual or psychological platitudes. When someone you love dies, the world stops making sense, and trying to ‘fix’ that disorientation only deepens the isolation of the bereaved.

Naming the Abyss

Devine insists that acknowledging pain is not pessimism—it is realism. Most of what passes as grief support is designed to manage discomfort rather than bear witness. Friends say things like, “At least you had them for as long as you did,” or “Everything happens for a reason.” Underneath those words lies an unspoken command: stop feeling how you feel. Devine calls this “the second half of the sentence,” a hidden epilogue that invalidates pain. True compassion, she explains, begins when we can say: “Yes, this is unbearable.”

She goes further by validating the chaotic symptoms of grief—insomnia, memory loss, rage, emptiness—as sane responses to an insane event. “Some things cannot be fixed,” she says. “They can only be carried.” Survival is not found in optimism or strength but in bearing witness to the brokenness of love itself.

Out-of-Order Death and the Moral Shock

Most of us can understand the death of an elderly parent as part of the natural order. But Devine focuses on out-of-order deaths—the sudden drowning, the suicide, the stillbirth, the random accident—that leave the brain unable to reconcile cause and effect. These ruptures annihilate identity. A spouse, parent, or child is gone; therefore the very structure of the world crumbles. “The life you expected to unfold disappears: vaporized.” In this state, you are not ‘crazy’—something crazy has happened.

By listing real examples—a baby dying days before birth, a young man paralyzed in a diving accident, a mother shot at random—Devine legitimizes the unspoken losses that society avoids. She gives the reader permission to name reality without dilution. That courage is transformative: “There is no reason for everything,” she says. “Not every loss has a silver lining.”

Learning to Live ‘Here’

Survival doesn’t mean recovery. It means learning to breathe inside a world that’s been reordered. Devine compares this to being dropped into a parallel universe—one in which all the ordinary rules are nullified. Even the simplest actions—shopping for groceries, hearing laughter—can feel surreal, even hostile. Yet the start of healing, she says, comes when you stop insisting that the world make sense again. It never will.

In modern therapy, grief often gets treated as a stage to move through toward transcendence. Devine rewrites that. “Grief is not something to pass. It’s the landscape you live in now.” Rather than coax readers into false hope, she teaches them to look straight at the devastation and still breathe. That naked honesty, paradoxically, is where life begins again. (This idea parallels Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, where the act of naming illusion becomes its own survival strategy.) For Devine, truth-telling is love’s final form.

Why do sympathy cards make you angry? Why does hearing “You’re so strong” feel insulting instead of soothing? In Chapter Two, Devine dissects the language of comfort to reveal its hidden violence. While well-meaning friends intend to help, their words often erase the one thing that could actually heal: acknowledgment.

The Hidden Command Inside Comfort

Devine introduces the idea of “the second half of the sentence.” When someone says, “At least you had her for as long as you did,” the invisible continuation is “so stop feeling so bad.” This pattern runs through almost every form of consolation—from “He’s in a better place” to “You’ll love again.” These phrases don’t confirm your pain; they cancel it. The result is isolation wrapped in kindness.

Grief Is Not a Problem to Solve

Before her partner’s death, Devine herself believed in the power of positive thinking. A favorite book on her shelf—Wayne Dyer’s There’s a Spiritual Solution to Every Problem—suddenly felt foreign. “There may be a solution to every problem,” she writes, “but grief isn’t a problem. It’s a natural response to love.” Grief violates the cultural preference for solutions and affirms the truth that love’s end hurts. Instead of removing the sting, real comfort honors it.

Comparison and the ‘Grief Olympics’

One of Devine’s sharpest observations is how quickly empathy turns into competition. When you share your story, people try to match it: “My dog died—I know just how you feel.” She calls this the “grief Olympics.” It’s an attempt to connect that backfires, because comparing collapses nuance. “Every loss is valid,” she concedes, “and every loss is not the same.” Recognizing the uniqueness of pain, she argues, is the foundation of compassion.

Instead of talking about their own sorrows, friends should listen to yours. The true act of empathy is not comparison but presence.

The Tyranny of Meaning

Many of grief’s most offensive clichés come from the need to impose meaning: “Everything happens for a reason”; “You needed this to grow.” Devine rejects this theology of transformation. Growth may occur, but it should never be demanded or prescribed. She points to research on post-traumatic growth, showing that only those already dissatisfied before loss tend to frame it as redemptive. “No one needs tragedy to become a better person,” she reminds us. “You were already enough.”

By exposing the hidden hierarchies in condolence—the subtle shaming, the moral superiority of the “strong”—Devine liberates both sides of the relationship. For grievers, she offers validation: it’s okay to hate people’s attempts at comfort. For friends, she gives a new framework: don’t fix, don’t preach, just witness. Compassion begins not with wisdom but with humility, the courage to say, “I don’t know what to say.”

In Chapter Three, Devine takes her critique further by tracing the cultural and professional roots of our ‘grief illiteracy.’ From Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s misunderstood stages of grief to Hollywood’s addiction to redemptive endings, she shows how the collective imagination has turned mourning into a morality play about triumph. The result is an anti-grief culture obsessed with happiness and redemption.

The Medicalization of Grief

Devine exposes the absurdity of labeling grief a psychological disorder after six months, as if longing for your dead spouse were a symptom rather than a testament to love. “Our medical model,” she writes, “calls grief a condition needing treatment.” Therapists, trained to find stages and solutions, often fail their grieving clients by treating sorrow as delay or dysfunction. She apologizes for her own profession’s shortcomings, noting that grieving people frequently have to educate their therapists about what’s normal.

Fairy-Tale Transformation

Popular culture reinforces the delusion that pain makes you stronger and that losses exist to teach lessons. Devine calls this the "overcoming narrative," powered by movies where widows start charities, parents of dead children run marathons, and everything ends in catharsis. She argues that this cultural script comes from our fear of pain—it’s easier to turn suffering into a story of triumph than to admit some wounds never heal. “Bad things happen,” she writes. “Sometimes the hero just keeps breathing.”

A New Hero’s Story

Devine redefines bravery. Heroism is not transcendence—it’s survival. A brave person is not someone who rises above heartache but one who continues to live while carrying it. “Being brave is staying present when your heart is shattered into a million pieces,” she says. Pain doesn’t turn you into a saint; it makes you human. Instead of rewarding ‘closure,’ she urges readers to value witness—the mutual recognition that we all carry unseen catastrophes.

By replacing the pursuit of closure with the practice of companionship, Devine paves the way for a new cultural narrative. Grief is not an aberration of love; it’s proof of it. Change begins, she insists, when we abandon the fantasy of transformation and tell the truth: many stories don’t end with rainbows. Some pain must simply be shared. (This echoes Brené Brown’s call for “wholeheartedness” but grounds it in sorrow rather than self-improvement.)

Why do we blame the grieving? Devine answers this by uncovering our collective emotional illiteracy—the inability to face pain without moral judgment. When tragedy strikes, people instinctively search for reasons: he didn’t eat well, she was careless, it must be karma. Blame becomes a psychological shield, a way to feel safe by believing we can prevent similar fates.

Blame as a Security Blanket

From religious fatalism to modern pop psychology, Devine shows how every era has rationalized suffering. In ancient and modern cultures alike, disasters are explained away as punishments or cosmic lessons. Quoting Brené Brown, she notes that “blame is a way to discharge discomfort.” If a grieving mother can be faulted for her child’s illness, we can pretend our own children are safe. This disconnection, Devine writes, “keeps us from the very love we fear losing.”

The Cult of Positivity

Perhaps the most insidious form of modern blame comes disguised as optimism. Mantras like “You create your own reality” or “Stay positive” shame people for feeling sad. Drawing on Barbara Ehrenreich’s critique of “the tyranny of positive thinking,” Devine argues that enforced cheerfulness turns grief into a moral failure. Suffering becomes your fault for not being enlightened enough. “It’s elitist,” she warns, “and spiritually violent.”

Her argument resonates with psychologist Susan David’s research on “toxic positivity,” which shows that denying difficult emotions reduces resilience. In Devine’s words, “Spiritual bypass—using faith or mindfulness to rise above pain—is just another refusal to feel.” True spirituality, she insists, should make you more tender, not more detached.

Pain as Kinship

Against this backdrop of denial, Devine reframes hurt as proof of connection: “Poignancy is kinship.” When we let another person’s sorrow move us, we affirm our belonging to one another. Pain, far from being pathological, is evidence that we’re alive. Emotional literacy means staying open to this poignancy rather than avoiding it. “Being alive in a fleeting world is hard,” she writes. “But it’s beautiful, too.”

Ultimately, Devine calls for cultural reform: we must teach ourselves and our children how to feel. When grief is welcomed instead of silenced, empathy replaces fear. Safety lies not in control but in connection. To love one another fully, she concludes, “we must love what dies.”

By the end of Part I, Devine proposes her alternative: a new, humane model of grief. We’ve been trapped between two false choices—be destroyed by loss or overcome it like a hero. Her third path, the middle way, invites us to live inside loss without being devoured by it. Not eternally broken, not magically healed—human.

From Mastery to Mystery

Western culture prizes “mastery,” the impulse to dominate every problem. Devine argues this works for technology but not for love or death. In her words, “Grief needs reverence, not results.” The new model replaces control with curiosity. Instead of asking “How do I get out of this?” we might ask “How do I live here?” This mirrors psychologist Pauline Boss’s notion of “ambiguous loss,” which encourages living inside uncertainty without demanding answers.

The Middle Ground

The middle ground of grief includes paradox. You can laugh while broken. You can love life while resenting it. Healing is not linear; it’s a spiral between agony and grace. Devine quotes poet David Whyte, who defines maturity as learning to inhabit vulnerability “as generous citizens of loss.” This means neither denying pain nor letting it define you—it means letting it live beside you.

Compassion as Revolution

The new model is profoundly relational. If we stop seeing grief as an enemy, we can support one another with honesty instead of pressure. “Imagine a world,” Devine muses, “where you could say ‘This hurts’ and have those words simply received.” Changing how we deal with grief could ripple outward to global empathy, since our refusal to face pain also underlies social violence and avoidance. Emotional literacy, she believes, can heal not only individuals but cultures.

Devine’s redefinition of grief as kinship through suffering recalls Rilke’s idea that “life’s work is to be defeated by ever greater things.” To be human, she suggests, is to love despite inevitable loss. When we stop trying to sanitize sorrow, we uncover a new kind of beauty—one born of truth, vulnerability, and connection.

Part II turns from theory to survival. “You can’t solve grief,” Devine says, “but you don’t have to suffer.” Here she draws a vital distinction between pain—which is natural—and suffering, which grows when pain is denied or invalidated. The task is not to erase agony but to reduce the unnecessary weight around it.

Pain vs. Suffering

Pain, Devine explains, is the direct experience of love torn away; suffering is the secondary torment caused by judgment, shame, or neglect. When we berate ourselves for not “healing fast enough,” we multiply our agony. The remedy is compassion. Using accessible exercises—a “vomit metric” for making decisions, journaling, and reality-checking your energy “bank account”—she helps readers care for their hearts like living organisms, not projects to complete.

Practical Tenderness

Devine’s practical chapters often surprise with their humanity. She tells readers it’s fine to abandon full grocery carts, keep ashes in the house, or avoid holidays entirely. Grief, she says, shrinks your world for a time, and that’s healthy. By honoring your own rhythms, you reintroduce choice and agency into a shattered life. “If taking off your wedding ring makes you throw up, don’t do it.” Small permissions like these restore dignity amid chaos.

She also tackles taboo emotions like rage and despair, treating them not as regressions but as love stories in disguise. “Anger,” she writes, “is fierce protection for what was lost.” Her tone blends the compassion of a therapist with the ferocity of a mourner who refuses spiritual platitudes.

Kindness as Self-Defense

Surviving grief, Devine tells us, rests on radical self-kindness. She asks, “Can you be as tender with yourself as you would with a friend?” Kindness here isn’t indulgence—it’s survival strategy. You can’t love others through pain until you learn to companion yourself. The book culminates in a “manifesto of self-care,” urging readers to sleep, eat, rest, and speak gently to their wounds. As she puts it: “To my sad self, hereafter—be kind.” (Note: this echoes Tara Brach’s concept of “Radical Acceptance,” which also frames compassion as both courage and medicine.)

The book closes not with resolution but with a quiet revolution: Love endures. “We grieve because we love,” Devine writes. “Grief is love’s wild twin.” In place of closure, she offers integration—a life woven around absence.

Continuing Bonds

Historically, psychology told mourners to sever ties with the deceased. Devine replaces disconnection with relationship. Love doesn’t die; it changes form. Through memory, ritual, and conversation with the dead, we carry the connection forward. Quoting Naomi Shihab Nye—“Love means you breathe in two countries”—she portrays grief as a borderland between worlds where both love and sorrow coexist.

The Tribe of After

No one can grieve for you, but others can grieve beside you. Devine celebrates the community forged through shared mourning—“the Tribe of After.” These are the people who understand you without needing explanations. Isolation transforms into kinship when you meet others living through the same devastation. Through collective honesty, we build what she calls “a culture of kindness.”

The Middle Ground of Grief

In her final pages, Devine reminds readers that life after loss will never match the mythology of “moving on.” But hope, redefined, becomes something gentler: not expectation of happiness, but trust in small mercies—the bullfinch outside the window, the kindness of strangers, the steady breath that keeps you here. “Some things cannot be fixed,” she concludes. “They can only be carried.” What remains, even after everything collapses, is love itself—the thread that weaves through absence and keeps us bound to the world.