Graduation season is an exciting milestone for high school seniors, but it can also be an emotionally complex time. As the end of the school year approaches, students are often balancing final assignments, graduation preparations, decisions about their future, and the reality that a major chapter of their lives is coming to an end. While many seniors feel excitement about what lies ahead, they may also experience stress, uncertainty, or mixed emotions about leaving behind fam

At its core, grief is loss. Many people think grief only happens when someone dies. While that can certainly be part of it, grief can come from many kinds of loss: relationships, life changes, health, dreams that didn’t unfold the way we hoped, and more. I often compare grief to the ocean. Emotions can come in waves. Some waves are small and gentle, while others feel large and overwhelming. But like waves in the ocean, emotions move. They rise, and eventually they pass.

Right after a breakup, you might feel disoriented—like you don’t know what to do with your time, your emotions, or even your thoughts. You might replay what went wrong or try to convince yourself that if you had done things differently, they would’ve stayed. That’s grief talking. And grief is allowed to take up space. But over time, as painful as it feels, breakups give you something else too: the chance to come back to yourself.