When you lose a loved one, finding a way to bounce back is challenging. You look for them in everyone else and become frustrated when nobody lives up to what they were. We live in a complicated, senseless world, and trying to make sense of grief is moot. Grief is not linear, and those who expect you to warm up to new people in your life following the loss of a loved one will never fully understand the weight of this grief.

This commonly happens with children who lose their parents, whether that’s to divorce or something far worse. You don’t want to dream of a world where someone else takes your guardian’s place; It feels like time should be stopped, indefinitely, until they somehow show up in your life again someday, like their departure was all just some silly misunderstanding. When the surviving parent decides to remarry, the world stops—just not in the way you wanted it to.

The teen in the story below holds a grudge against his estranged father and his new girlfriend after they decide to try to parent him following his mother’s passing. The teen would have rather lived with his grandmother and grandfather, who actually knew him. Now, the teen refuses to get into his family feels because, to him, they are nothing of the sort.