Week 11 Practicum: Grief

The hollow ache of an absence, where the space someone or something used to fill carries its own heavy, enduring gravity

3 May 2027

Grief is the one experience in this course that cannot be safely induced, and this week does not ask you to try. Read the policies page before you begin: it sets out an alternative reflection and a full opt-out, and using either is not a lesser response to this week. If you are in acute grief right now, or if this week raises anything you need support with, the policies page also names where to go.

Separately, and much less importantly: this week’s $100 experience grant still lands today. Spending it, deferring it, or leaving it toward another week is entirely your call — see policies for the mechanics, and don’t let it pressure how you approach the practicum above.

Before the practicum#

Choose an absence you already carry — a person, a place, a version of your life, a relationship, a stage that ended. It doesn’t need to be recent, and it doesn’t need to be large by anyone else’s measure; the point is that it’s real and already yours, not one you construct for the exercise.

In the practicum#

Spend unhurried, undistracted time with what specifically the absence used to fill — not the loss in the abstract, but the particular shape of the gap it left. A grief for a person often has a very specific texture: a chair, a phone number you no longer call, a habit you built around someone who is no longer there to receive it.

Afterwards#

Write about the shape of the gap rather than the fact of the loss — what exactly used to be there, and what stands in its place now. If you used the alternative reflection or opted out, write about that choice instead, and that account is a complete and sufficient response to this week.