Beating yourself up is very normal. That's where forgiveness comes in. I lost an uncle when I was 16. And he was actually more a best friend than an uncle. And he got very sick with terrible disease. And I didn't go see him. I couldn't see him in that condition. And for years and years, I beat up on myself that I hadn’t seen him, and oh how terrible it was. That doesn't serve them and it doesn't serve you. So speaking to your audience: It's really important to grieve however you need to grieve. When you’re ready to forgive, remember to forgive yourself and them. Because there's always stuff that gets left undone.

I think we live in this world now where we don't talk about this stuff. Like I can tell you that 100% that there are people, more than we think, who are lonely as shit, and have nobody and are so confused and are like isolating, and isolating, and that breaks my heart. And whenever I moved to a new country…And then there was a new kid, I would always invite that kid…Because they would sit alone, and I could see it…Because that's an awful experience. Being like, “Where do I sit?” Like that's real. But it is important to talk about feeling like you don't have a friend or feeling like you don't have someone who you can start building something off with. It is sad. Of course it's sad. You know, I wish more people had more friends.

Prison just strips you bare to just the inner part of who you really are. That's all you have left when you're in prison. And if you're lucky enough, you can focus on that and find ways that you can bring that forth when you get out of prison because, going back to superficial relationships and casual relationships, it just never did work for me after prison because those things are not important. So I have a few people in my life that I have these really deep, deep relationships with. And if you're not a person that I can be deep with then, you know, I just don't take the time because I've learned what you can receive from an investment that's so much deeper and casual friendships just really don't have value to me anymore.

And it was kind of a union that was just supposed to be from that point forward. Like we took all our classes together. We worked together, we studied together, and she was just, I mean, the yin to my Yang, in so many beautiful ways. She made me feel like I belonged in a time that I never really felt like I did. And so that partnership, just that that ability to feel like I was forging into this impossible future doing this impossible thing. It just felt not lonely and it felt doable. And it was just the coolest way to meet somebody. And then to know that that type of just casual interaction turned into one of the most profound and deepest, closest friendships that I have.

But then when you're in a situation where you actually are grieving a friend, who isn't a family member, who was such an integral part of your life, like your actually daily life…And not to say that your parent isn't a part of your daily life, I just lost my dad so I can tell you that that's hard. But when you lose a friend, it's completely different because those are the people that you laugh with. Those are the people you're silly with. Those are the people that you make memories with, when you are at the pinnacle of your life…going out to dinner, having a lot of fun sharing your family and their family and having dinners together because you choose to…

My brother had a theory about what it takes to process grief... And his idea was that once you're able to integrate that event as a part of the story of your life, then you're able to move forward…unresolved trauma, things that keep us stuck in certain places, are situations where we're unable to integrate an event with our story or our idea of what our life is.

And I think specifically with friends that is harder because of what we talked about, like “whose story is it?”, it feels sometimes inappropriate to think about things in that way. And it also sometimes is hard to come away with a clear story, like who “was I to this person?”, “they were someone to me but was that truly who they were because other people see them different”. I think it can cause more reason to be stuck…you have more of an inability to integrate that story because the pieces don't come together as easily…

…grief is universal and highly personal. And we all go through grieving, but rarely are we doing it at the same time. And even if you and I both lose someone equally important to us, we each had individual relationships. And so it's still going to be a personal response and reaction. And that can be really difficult for other people to swallow. It can be even harder for other people to hold. And it I think it's sort of like a balance between you know, “I'm grieving. I don't need you to hold my grief. But I do need you to hold space for my grief.” There's a difference and I think a lot of people feel like it's one in the same. Like, “if you're sad, I have to be sad.”

I like to describe grief as like a ball and your brain is a box. And in the beginning, your brain is quite small, the box is quite small and the ball is quite big, and it keeps bumping around and every time it bumps a surface. Every time it bumps the inside of the box you're hurting, and you're back in that in that very first deep, deep, sorrowful pain. But as time goes on the box around the ball grows, and it hits the sides less and less often. It's never gonna stop hitting the sides of that box. You're always gonna have moments where you go back to that place and you're hurting and you're in pain. But it will happen less and less often. And you'll have time to grow around it and learn how to deal with it.