1. You use distractions

When you’re suffering from a great loss, you’ll do anything and everything just to forget the excruciating pain of missing them. Whether it’s social media, video games, or even Netflix, you use distractions to avoid remembering your grief—to avoid remembering they aren’t here any longer.

2. You overwork yourself

Even when it isn’t necessary, you pour your energy into your work. Each moment that you start to remember how it feels when they brought so much light and radiance in your life, you bury yourself in your work tasks. You even work ahead because you don’t want to feel anything.

3. You become distant

One of the worst side effects when you haven’t confronted your grief head on is that you’ll see yourself detaching from yourself. You see yourself and how you’re living your everyday life, but it feels more of existing rather than living. You see yourself, but grief has replaced the light and bliss in your soul.

4. Your future plans are unclear

When you lose someone in death, the crippling darkness is just too much to take. You keep replaying the moments you wish you could go back to—the moments you wish you knew they were sick with cancer, or the moments you could have spent more time with them. When you haven’t recovered from grief, you don’t know how to move forward with your life.

5. You choose isolation more

Similar to distancing yourself, grief has a certain impact on you that leaves you craving for isolation more. When you haven’t recovered from grief, isolation sounds like a pleasing idea to you than being around people, even the people you love. You’d rather drown yourself in isolation with your demons, because you’re the only one who can understand your grief.

6. You lose your drive and ambition

Before the person you loved passed away, you were filled with so much drive and motivation for accomplishing your goals. After losing them, you lost sense of your priorities and you’ve lost track of what really matters in life. Your career and professional life seems like the least of your priorities.

7. You’re easily frustrated

Life isn’t always a walk in the park and it can be more difficult than easy. When you’re not completely healed from grief, absolutely anything can tick you off. Even the slightest inconvenience can irritate you, even when the reasoning behind it is irrational.

8. Your emotions are all over the place

Grief is the darkest emotion you can feel, and it’s not the kind of darkness you can easily counter. When you lose someone like that, you don’t know how to process things. One minute you think you’re fine, and the next you suddenly have an outburst of emotions. That’s the thing about grief is that it never gets better, you just get stronger.