You Have Been Performing. But Are You Well?

A conversation with grief facilitator Kymberly Vaughn Daniels changed the way I understand grief and what I have been carrying.

In the last two months, three people I knew passed away. Not strangers. People I had a real connection with. Their passing reminded me how precious life is.

I once read something that said to engage with people like it may be the last time you see them. I took that seriously. It means something to know every exchange I had with them was genuine.

Their passing stirred something in me I could not quite name at first. I knew it was grief, but I also knew it was more than that. Grief had been showing up long before those phone calls came.

It was in the loss of community that came with relocating. The familiar faces. The people who knew you without an introduction. The tribe that just showed up.

Losing that kind of connection leaves something unnamed sitting inside you. I wanted to understand what I was actually carrying, so I connected with someone who helped me do exactly that.

Kymberly Vaughn Daniels is a grief and trauma-informed facilitator, and she said something I have not stopped thinking about. Grief is the deepest feeling attached to whatever you have lost. And that loss is not always a person. Sometimes it is a version of your life you had to release before you ever got to mourn it.

She also helped me understand why grief can feel bigger than the moment in front of you. When something major hits, you may not just be grieving that loss. You may be grieving everything you pushed down since childhood. When the big loss comes, all of it moves at once.

Kymberly knew that from the inside out.

Her son, Mykai Daniels, was murdered in June of 2023. Grief and trauma do not travel separately. They share the same room.

Two years before his death, she had committed to three words: clarity, closeness, and connection. Those words came back to her when everything fell apart. Not as a comfort she planned for, but as the foundation she had left.

So when she said, “It is not enough to perform well. We must also be well,” it did not sound like a tagline. It sounded like something she had already lived on the other side of.

Many of us know what performing well looks like. We keep the calendar moving. We show up. We look like we have it together because falling apart in public is not something most of us can afford.

But grief does not stay in your feelings. It moves into your body. Stomach problems. Heart problems. Tension in your neck, your back, your hands.

For Black women especially, Kymberly connected that weight to what we already know: high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease. The body keeps receipts on everything we told ourselves we were fine about.

When grief gets heavy, the first instinct is often isolation. Kymberly understood that. But she said you do not grieve well alone. You need a safe place. Someone not in a hurry for you to be okay.

She found that in a support group because grief is sometimes a need family cannot meet. Not every room is worthy of your grief. The right one will not rush you toward the door.

She said grief does not shrink. You grow around it. And in that, there are gifts. Not the kind anyone would choose, but the kind that come anyway.

The question worth sitting with may not be whether you are over it. It may be whether you have been honest about what you actually lost.

Grief is patient. It will wait. But your body may not wait as long.

Take good care of yourself. Truly. Not just in what you get done, but in what you finally let yourself feel.

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