Man Down: What the Hell is Happening to Me?

Your system is short-circuiting because it’s trying to save you.

The person you loved is dead and so is the world you thought you knew. And neither are ever coming back. You can’t even begin to wrap your head around what the hell that means. All you’re feeling is the pain that tells you it must be true.

You’re dealing emotions so intense that they can bring you to your knees. The mental and physical exhaustion are so overwhelming that getting out of bed is like climbing a mountain. You feel so much pressure that you wonder if you’ll explode. You might even want to tear your own skin off in a desperate attempt to escape the intolerable feelings. Your thoughts are an electrical storm raging in your skull that you can’t turn off and can’t make sense of.

You’re not going crazy. I know it feels like you are but what you’re experiencing is what happens when your nervous system, your brain, your heart, your entire way of being takes a direct hit from a howitzer. The map of your world has been destroyed. You’re more lost than you’ve ever been.

Your system is in survival mode. It’s shutting down what it can’t handle and focusing on the basics: keeping you upright, breathing, and alive.

You might feel numb, out of it, like you’re floating above yourself. Maybe you’ve been calm and collected when everyone else is falling apart. Or maybe you’ve been crying so hard your ribs hurt. You might be moving through your days like a robot, mechanically talking to funeral directors, texting people back, showing up to work because you don’t know where else to go.

Or you might be stuck in bed, unable to get dressed, staring at the wall for hours. None of it means you’re doing it wrong. It means your system is overwhelmed. And it’s doing its damned best to keep you from emotionally collapsing. If it let in all the pain at once, you wouldn’t be able to function at all.

This is what shock looks like. It’s not always dramatic. It’s not some Hollywood-style breakdown. Sometimes it looks like scrolling your phone for hours. Sometimes it looks like planning a memorial while feeling absolutely nothing. Sometimes it looks like rage - punching walls, swearing at God, or yelling at your kid for leaving their socks on the floor. Shock can make you quiet. It can make you manic. It can make you dead inside and out. And sometimes, it makes you feel like a stranger in your own life.

What you’re feeling, or not feeling, isn’t weakness. It’s biology. It’s normal. And it’s absolutely horrible.

You’ve been ambushed by something you didn’t see coming, or couldn’t stop. Your life has become hell on earth and the world keeps spinning like nothing happened.

That’s the part that really messes with your head. You might be in the grocery store picking up bread and toothpaste, and suddenly it hits you like a punch to the gut: How is everyone walking around like the world didn’t end? You want to scream, Don’t you know what happened? But they don’t. And that makes you feel even more invisible. Even more alone.

Of course, that’s just the half of it. When you don’t feel invisible, you feel like you’re under a microscope. You used to enjoy walking your dog. Now, it seems like everyone is looking at you with sad faces like you’re an object of pity. You know they’re whispering about you amongst themselves. Overnight you’ve gone from being a neighbour to a leper.

Grief, especially early grief, is one of the most disorienting experiences a person can go through. It’s not just sadness. It’s chaos. It’s your mind racing and going blank at the same time. It’s forgetting why you walked into a room. It’s sitting at a red light for way too long before realizing it turned green. It’s finding yourself lost in a memory so vivid you swear you can hear their voice in the next room. And then it hits you like a taser when you realize it wasn’t real. You’re not losing it. You’re grieving.

And grieving screws up everything.

Your sleep. Your appetite. Your patience. Your memory. Your energy. Your sex drive. Your ability to think clearly or care about anything. It rewires your brain in real time. And the worst part? It doesn’t come with instructions or a tidy process. You have no idea what it will feel like from one moment to the next. The only thing that’s certain is that whatever comes next will absolutely suck.

Most guys know jack about grief. Our dads sure as hell didn’t talk to us about it. And many of saw them bury it or try to drink it away. We don’t think about grief until it punches us in the face. We sure as hell don’t talk about it with our buddies.

Then someone we love dies and we have no idea what’s happening to us. How could you? Nobody told you this is what it would feel like. Nobody warned you that even when you do get a few hours of sleep, you might wake up and forget for a split second that they’re gone and then get hit with it all over again. Those moments are damn cruel.

You’re wondering if this will ever stop or if you’ve really lost your mind. Will the fog ever lift? Will your mind come back online so you at least do the most basic tasks? Will it ever stop feeling like you’re walking through mud with a boat anchor around your neck?

Not yet. And not for quite a while.

But it will. It won’t happen all at once. Not by a long shot. You aren’t going to have a magical moment where all the pain goes away and you’ve “moved on” - whatever the hell that means. When you finally have a moment where things feel a little less awful, the next one will be pure torture. And the cycle will repeat itself, over and over and over until you feel like you have nothing else to give.

It won’t be today, and it won’t be tomorrow. But at some point, something will shift. and you’ll realize you it made it through the hour without wanting to smash something into a million pieces.

That’s what counts as a win right now.

So if you’re reading this and thinking, What the hell is wrong with me? - the answer is: nothing. What’s wrong is what happened to you. And your system is doing what it’s designed to do when your life becomes unrecognizable in the worst possible way.

You are not broken. You are overwhelmed. And your body is trying to keep you from going under.

That doesn’t make you weak. It makes you human, brother.

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Read More of This Guide

• Read This First
  Welcome to Grief. I’m sorry you’re here.

• What the Hell Is Happening to Me?
  Your system is short-circuiting because it’s trying to save you.

• What Grief Does to a Man’s Mind
  Why You’re Going Silent, Blowing Up, or Disappearing

• What to Expect in the Days, Weeks, and Months Ahead
  The Funeral Isn’t the Finish Line. It’s the Starting Gun.

• What to Do Right Now
  You can’t fix this. But you can survive it.

• The Mask Is a Lie You Tell Yourself to Feel in Control
  You don’t owe anyone a performance while your world is burning.

• When the Urge to Escape Takes Over
  You want to punch something. Or disappear. Or drink until you black out.

• What’s Going to Mess with Your Head
  How to see the lies that grief makes so easy to believe.

• Why You Don’t Have to Make Meaning Yet
  Meaning can come later. Getting through the day is enough.

• Final Word
  You're still here. That matters.