The Right to Hurt

We live in a world that worships positivity. “Stay strong.” “Keep smiling.” “Everything happens for a reason.” But sometimes, the reason hurts and the reason breaks your heart, tests your patience, and leaves you staring at the ceiling wondering why it had to happen at all. In the in those moments, you have the right, the absolute right, to hurt.

There’s a special kind of ache that comes from losing someone close, whether it’s through death, divorce, or the quiet drifting apart of a relationship you thought would last forever. It’s the kind of loss that rearranges you. You start to measure time differently: before and after. You replay conversations, relive last looks, reread old messages. The world keeps spinning, but you don’t, at least not right away. And that’s perfectly fine.

You’re not weak for missing them. You’re not “stuck” because you still cry when you smell their perfume, or because you still check your phone for their name. You’re simply being human, a creature built to love deeply, and therefore, to grieve deeply too.

Anger often sneaks in next, often manifesting itself as the sharp-edged cousin of sorrow. Anger at the unfairness, the betrayal, the silence. But anger, too, is a form of love. It’s love that hasn’t found a safe place to land yet.

Feel it.

Don’t bury it under politeness or forced acceptance. Sit with it until it tells you what it needs you to know. Because only by acknowledging it can you begin to let it go. Healing doesn’t mean forgetting. It means learning how to live with the memories and still move forward.

Pain doesn’t just live in our hearts; sometimes it finds its way into our desks, our inboxes, our careers. Maybe you poured yourself into a project, only to watch it unravel. Maybe you were overlooked, undervalued, or spoken to in a way that left you small. Maybe you worked so hard to prove yourself that you forgot to protect yourself.

And then, one day, something snapped and you realise you’re not okay.

We often treat professional pain as less legitimate than personal pain. “It’s just work,” people say. But our jobs carry pieces of our identity, our pride, our self-worth. When things go wrong there, it hurts. And you have every right to feel that hurt.

You have the right to be angry when someone crosses a line.
You have the right to feel disappointed when effort isn’t recognised.
You have the right to cry after a bad meeting, not because you’re fragile, but because you care.

The goal isn’t to stay angry forever. It’s to give anger its brief, honest moment so it can pass through instead of settling in. Suppressed feelings don’t disappear; they harden. But acknowledged ones, even the ugliest, start to soften.

You have the right to fall apart. You also have the power to rebuild. The key is balance: to give emotions space without giving them the steering wheel. To feel the grief, the fury, the exhaustion, and still remember that beneath all of it, you’re made of resilience.