By Aimee, Project Lead of Gracie’s Way, for National Grief Awareness Day 2026
Never above you. Never below you. Always beside you.
— Walter Winchell
Firstly, I’d like to start this guest post for National Grief Awareness Day 2026 on Gum On My Shoe, with the biggest thank you to Martin for allowing me the opportunity to write this piece and feature this very important topic on such a big platform. You may have seen my name on this blog previously but being referred to as another blogger (on www.imnotdisordered.co.uk), but this post comes to you from my position of Project Lead of the pet bereavement project I launched in January called Gracie’s Way (www.graciesway.co.uk). I’ve decided to use this guest post to focus on the impact that pet bereavement content can have on a person’s mental health — with no relevance to whether they’ve lost a pet or whether they had even just begun searching for such content! And that’s why it matters so much — people are seeing this even where they are wanting to or don’t need to. And so, where the bereavement content is having a negative impact, why not arm people with coping skills? Or, if it’s had a positive impact, why not encourage that? And, why not, maybe even motivate others to start creating such content themselves to hopefully benefit from doing so, in some of the ways that I have? Let’s begin with the creation of Gracie’s Way and my poor assumptions.
Surprisingly Wrong Expectations of the Amount of Pet Bereavement Content
Something that surprised me a heck of a lot after deciding to create Gracie’s Way’s Instagram (@GraciesWayUK) was the amount of pet bereavement content on there. One big failure I made in creating Gracie’s Way was that I didn’t do any social media research around relevant content. I purely assumed that because there’s barely any specialist, professional support for pet loss out there (we do have a very short Help Directory on the website and I massively recognise the importance and respect due to them, even if they aren’t in huge numbers) there likely wouldn’t be much online content on pet bereavement either. I had thought the two went hand-in-hand, that if there were more organisations working on a theme, then they’d be creating content, and they’d be encouraging their audience to as well — as this is how it somewhat works with mental health content too!
Now, the decision I’m glad I made in creating Gracie’s Way was about opting to only create the one social media platform for it. I knew that with my three own accounts and my blog, and the Gracie’s Way articles, it was going to be too big of a workload. So, based on some research but, mostly, on my own experiences of it, I decided to purely create an Instagram for the project. The happiness of this decision comes alongside the realisation that there’s a lot of content out there because in all honesty, if I were being met with all this bereavement content from all three platforms, I’d feel suffocated. Actually, I honestly believe I’d drown in it!
The hope I found though, was that mental health content — particularly around trauma, self-harm, and suicide — used to impact me to that degree, but over my thirteen years creating content, I’ve come to adjust to the overwhelming feelings around the amount of content. So, I figure that I will do the same with pet bereavement content too — especially because it’s coming from the one platform whereas the mental health content was around on all three of my accounts! And also especially because the coping skills and strategies I’ve developed for coping with mental health and trauma content etc are ones which can be edited somewhat to fit pet bereavement content too.
So, let’s start there, shall we?
My Top 3 Tips to Coping with the Amount of Content
1. Keep it necessary. If you don’t have to look at the heart-breaking, emotional content then don’t subject yourself to doing so! Only look at content and only for as long as is required and don’t comment or engage in anything that isn’t necessary or preferable either.
2. Create a routine or time limit. I find it useful to assign times of the day to particular projects or tasks. In order to prioritise things, it usually helps where something has a deadline too, but if it’s just about social media content, there may not be a deadline, try to set a time limit for yourself.
3. Never believe that you have to “earn” or “deserve” some sort of period of a break or distraction activity to take away from doing something challenging, upsetting, or distressing. It’s a wellbeing right and something you’re fully entitled to without any notion of having to be deserving of it.
Establishing Your Motivations
Another useful tool in coping with looking through upsetting content is by establishing motivations for why you need to do it. For me, if I’m struggling to do anything — to be honest! — I find it super helpful to just focus on remembering why I’m doing it. If I can concentrate on why it matters to me and what’s so important about it, then I find I have more strength, determination, passion, interest, care, energy, and courage to go through with it and do it! So, my key motivations for Gracie’s Way are as follows.
1. Inspiration
I find looking at content inspirational in one key way; that it can provide me with new, creative, and very different thoughts and ideas for Instagram and website content or work for Gracie’s Way that I might not have had off my own volition. That I might not have had if I hadn’t seen the content of others. The example of Gracie’s Way content that was inspired by other content is actually a bit different to what I’ve been talking about in that it wasn’t inspired by other social media content — but still media content, nonetheless. In this specific instance, in the shape of Emmerdale — a UK Soap on ITV — and so the content on Gracie’s Way Instagram was named Top Tips to Coping with Pet Loss Triggers.
When I first started blogging in 2013, it was just as Zoe Sugg or Zoella was becoming popular, and influencers were becoming a thing — but mostly via YouTube channels rather than blogging. (Except for Victoria Magrath who does both/everything!) But, either way, despite neither Zoe nor Victoria creating content about mental health, I looked to them for inspiration for my own content. I actually wrote a blog post about comparing my own content’s success and popularity to hers, Zoella and I’m NOT Disordered? When I realised that there was only so much inspiration I could gain because of that difference in content (they focused on fashion and beauty), I decided to get more creative with it and in starting to write blog posts about their more personal methods of inspiration but this soon turned me to find only Victoria to be my role model and career inspiration and so, I wrote about her/that in The Greatest Female Inspiration in my Blogging Career.
Despite this change and development in my means of inspiration in those early days, you’ll see from the fact that I published those blog posts that I’ve always been big on recognising those who have inspired me and I do this because I was brought up to treat others as I wanted to be treated. I’ve always massively appreciated when people have credited me or particular pieces of the content that I’ve created that have influenced or inspired them too. And it helps me to see that there’s a bigger sense of purpose and hugely different to my content than what I might have intended or hoped for. Like, perhaps I was trying to initiate hope, but it’s gone on to influence someone to actually reach out for help from professionals.
If I find myself struggling with pet bereavement content, I try to remember the two sides of inspiration: that I need to look at this content to inspire content for me to create for Gracie’s Way and then also, that in doing this, I could then inspire others in whatever way too. Something which also massively helps here is to formalize it too — of course this isn’t going to work for someone who creates content on the side of a 9–5 job or something, but where content creation or being an influencer is a career? Separating yourself somewhat from looking through content and just keeping in your head that your job needs for you to do this, and that it isn’t always about you having to relate your entire self to things. It can be about giving some sort of consideration on how others might relate to it and how you can create content to help those people.
2. Your Impact on Others
That last bit links nicely to this next point around motivation and how one reason for looking through pet bereavement content can be that it inspires or influences you to do something and that could impact on others.
Almost immediately in my influencer career journey, I began receiving comments and feedback on my blog posts over on I’m NOT Disordered and I’m actually very grateful that they started so early on and didn’t just happen when my blog started to grow in popularity or that might have made it more of a shock to the system! Whereas, receiving things straight away is the exact opposite because it’s meant that I actually haven’t really known any different, so I haven’t had to accept something or had to learn to adjust to something. It’s just the way it’s always been. I’ve always known how monumental and fundamental my content either is or can be, for the safety and stability of others in their own mental health journey. And I’m glad about that because I honestly believe it’s helped to provide me with so much motivation to continue creating content to as high a standard as I felt would make it worthy and deserving of all the attention it was starting to get and how much praise and positive feedback, I was receiving.
Sadly, because this shouldn’t be something you feel lucky about, I’ve luckily received only two horrible comments in my entire thirteen years of blogging. However, those two comments were really nasty, and one, in particular, was actually completely fundamental and totally responsible to me closing the blog completely down for one month back in the end of 2014 (September–October) — the one and only time in thirteen years that I’ve stopped blogging! But, I actually still feel somewhat fortunate for those — especially the one which led to me closing my blog down — because doing so helped me to discover a passion and dedication for this career that I hadn’t recognised or realised was within me until then. You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone — it’s like that!
I won’t lie; knowing your content is having such a profound impact on others can definitely be pressuring and stressful. My greatest issue with it was a while after I had been discharged from the psychiatric hospital I was in when I created I’m NOT Disordered and I had my first relapse. I was very aware that I had become a bit of a poster-child for recovery and that it was going to be incredibly difficult to put anything out there about the relapse because I felt 100% certain that it had the potential to rock readers’ stability too. I felt such that it could very understandably leave people thinking “so you get that well and still go backwards?” And I knew this could be a thought for others because it was one of the many heart-breaking and disappointing thoughts going through my head too.
I managed to switch things though and turned it into motivation to spread the word that relapses happen — you can take 20 steps forward and 5 back but that doesn’t mean your recovery is over or that there’s no point in still trying to get back to 20 steps forward! And it made me realise that professionals tend not to make service users aware of the possibility of relapse — which is likely because they’re afraid they’ll phrase it wrong and it’ll end up destroying a person’s hope and recovery.
3. Inner Healing and Validation
Finally, motivation and rationale for looking at pet bereavement content isn’t all about others or your own content creation and career path. It’s about you, too. There’s a motivation there that’s about your best interests and your own wellbeing too. Emotionally and physically. One key way I personally benefit from such content has been validation. Over the years, I’ve discovered that validation, for me and my mental health, is absolutely paramount to my wellbeing and recovery and can be a deal-breaker in my physical safety levels and emotional stability and resilience. And I think that’s because there have been so many instances where mental health professionals haven’t provided me with validation when I’ve massively, desperately needed it in moments of actual, intense, and incredibly physically unsafe mental health crisis.
In my opinion, validation isn’t a difficult thing to provide someone with. It doesn’t take a whole lot of effort or thought to literally just say it in the simplest of ways like; “I know what you mean” or “that makes sense” or “you’re bound to be thinking/feeling like that.” And, validation is something that you can say — like those very simple comments — where it doesn’t matter hugely if you actually can’t understand where someone is coming from or you don’t totally agree with them or can’t empathise and relate to their situation and why they’re struggling. And this is very obviously a huge issue in pet bereavement because there are — strangely, to me — people out there who have never had a pet before and so it’s actually not even purely about never losing one — they literally don’t know how it feels to even have one to begin with!
For me, validation is actually really more powerful when it comes from a complete stranger. That doesn’t mean my loved ones shouldn’t try it for me if I come to them upset, nor does it mean that it doesn’t mean the world to me when they do it! It’s just that I — and my mental health — seem to be more largely impacted when the validation comes from a stranger or a professional who I don’t know and have never met. And I think this is because when it is someone I know and care for, I always have that worry “are they just saying it?” and it’s not that I think anyone in my life is ingenuine or would lie to me, but it’s a niggle that I get. An unfounded one, admittedly!
Over to You(!)
Now, something I love with some of Martin’s content is when he does this little bit at the end that’s like “over to you” or something! So, just to be clear — this isn’t a section I normally create; it’s completely inspired by other pieces of Martin’s.
I’d like for you to now go away and sit and write a little list of motivations you have. Of all the reasons you can think of as to why looking at pet bereavement content can be helpful or positive or productive for you in some way. And, if you have the time, think about numbering those motivations and considering giving them ranking of priorities as to which is most important, which makes the largest difference, and maybe even consider in which ways they do make a difference. This can help you to be more in tune, if you’re struggling, to recognise what you need in that moment and in what way you can get it.
Please also check Gracie’s Way out (www.graciesway.co.uk) and the Instagram (@gracieswayuk).
This isn’t the only content I’ve created for National Grief Awareness Day. Over on my blog (www.imnotdisordered.co.uk) there’s a massive collaboration with Etsy store Pawfect Piccies going live (it’s likely up when Martin posts this one!) which includes a whopping 35% off discount code for their items exclusive to I’m NOT Disordered readers! This is where the Gracie’s Way top I’m wearing in the photo is from. So, please check that out too to see if they have anything you’d like to use the code for, or find it via my own Instagram (@aimes_wilson)!
Thank you for having Gracie’s Way, Martin!
Photo and graphics by the author.
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