The opening segment of the virtual Day of Remembrance event introduces Vivian Nunez, a writer, content creator, and mental‑health advocate. Through her writing, Instagram presence, and the online community Too Damn Young, she supports grieving young adults, emphasizing that navigating grief or mental‑health challenges does not preclude a happy life. Her credentials include speaking at the United Nations and features in Forbes, Mic, Well+Good, and Instagram. The host welcomes her to the call, setting the stage for her forthcoming discussion on grief, mental health, and creativity.
Vivian Nunez is a writer and content creator. Through her writing and Instagram, Vivian reminds her community that going through hard things, navigating your mental health or your grief, does not disqualify you from having a happy life. She is also the founder of Too Damn Young, an online community and resource site for grieving young adults. Vivian has spoken at the United Nations and has been featured by Instagram and on platforms like Forbes, Mic, and Well+Good. We welcome Vivian Nunez to our call. Hi, Vivian.
Hi.
Hi.
Great to have you here. Oh my gosh, thank you for having me. And I've got to say, one of my favorite things ever when I'm jumping on these calls is just scrolling through the pages and pages of people. And it's such a— I think especially sitting where we are right now ahead of a day like tomorrow, it's so meaningful to be able to look through and see 478 other faces that understand some fraction of what everyone else is going through. And so I'm very honored to be here today. And like Hope said in the introduction, I am a writer and a content creator. primarily focused on mental health, grief, and creativity. I think that there's this great intersection in between all the things we go through and all the ways that we learn to navigate it. So often I feel like the thing that I've learned the most about grief over the last 18 years, which is my mom passed away in 2003, I was 10 years old, and it was my first experience with grief. And actually looking back on a lot of my writing that I've been doing recently has been sitting on thinking about what it was like to lose her at 10 years old in a family that didn't really talk about loss, didn't talk about the mental health impact, never really discussed the what happens after part of it. And I remember I have this blue notebook that I would always write poetry in, and that was my outlet. That was my space that I went and really my container for grief. So a lot of what I wanted to talk about today was that it's this ability that we have to an opportunity we have really to create a container for our grief on the heaviest days. And it's something that we can take and not take. There have been years in the last 18 where I have taken that opportunity and created something from it. There have been days when I've looked at the container and said, it's nice that you're there, but I'm just gonna sit on the couch and watch Netflix for the rest of the day. And I think that the more that we can acknowledge what that looks like for us, the more that that opportunity is something that may be interesting. When we were on the call right now, like I said, I was flipping through all the Zoom pages and those little squares, and I saw some people who were knitting on the call, some people who were sitting in, you could tell that they were in the midst of something creative while they were sitting within this. And I think that that, in essence, is exactly what bringing creativity and folding that into your lived experience is. You want to create something that is easy for you already. This is not a time to pick up a new hobby or a new thing that you want to try for the very first time, unless that's something that's appetizing for you. I think so much of what is available is just this aspect of having something that is comforting for us, because grief feels so large. I heard this really wonderful quote actually on a Netflix binge this week that said that grief remains the same size. The job for us, especially through our lives, is to learn how to grow bigger around it. And creativity for me has always been that vehicle. It's everything from creating for Instagram to writing blog posts to finding ways to connect with other people. The 5 different parts of that for me are having community, which honestly you can check the box on really going the creativity route for this Mother's Day weekend by being here. Because you showed up to a place that isn't in the norm of someone who— in Mother's Day land. And here we are, and you can look around and there's 480 other people here, all for the same exact reason. And that same community, the one that you can turn to, whether literally or figuratively, as you're navigating other creative ways to cope with these days. I think grief feels so vast, particularly on weekends like this. And in that vastness, we can get lost. And it's easy to forget that we have tools at our disposal that can help us cope through it. And the more that we are able to sit with that vastness and realize that we still have agency within it, the easier it gets. But at the same time, there's no way to anticipate what tomorrow will look like for any of us. If I've learned anything over 18 years, it is that. It is the fact that no matter what, we— I can wake up tomorrow and feel like I'm ready to do all the things and like I'm ready to share in moments and I'm ready to talk about my mom. And there are years I wake up and it's like, it's really hard to get out of bed and I don't really want to talk about it and I want to pretend it's another Sunday. And allowing yourself to have those moments, all of that is a part of the greater creative nature of what you can do on these days. I think one of the things that I love to talk about when I talk about this is the goal isn't to have a side hustle at the end of this day. It isn't to have something that's going to be lucrative or in any way, shape, or form be something that you have to do every single day of your life. But it's a reminder that you can feel things and survive them, because I think death anniversaries, Mother's Days, birthdays have a way of making us feel like we can't. Like, 24 hours is the longest 24 hours of my life, and how am I actually going to navigate through this? And with Mother's Day, I mean, kind of to what everyone has been saying, I feel like I'm just reverberating back what has been said already so far, but we have these opportunities to see how grief really manifests no matter what age and point we are in. And like, I'm 28 years old right now. It's been 18 years. I mean, who I was when my mother passed away and who she knew me as is a— I mean, a million different versions of me have been born since then. And trying to honor that and reconcile the version of the relationship I have with my mom, so much of that is creativity. It's writing. It's giving myself that container to sit down and say grief is manageable for me here. And it is something that I don't have to be afraid of. And it is something I can sit with and allow to be what it needs to be, all the while reminding myself that I can still be the person that I am the days before, the days after a really hard grief day. And having that power within yourself just makes it a little bit easier to navigate. And as we were kind of thinking about what to talk about here and how to really make— I think for me the important part was making sure that no one felt pressured to have to be creative at the end of this or to feel like they had to go and pick something up tomorrow and that was the only way. But to just remember that there is that level of layers of agency that can exist for you on a day like today, and that remembering that is as easy as looking around and realizing that here we are in community today. And that having that safe space, redefining what it means to have these cards in front of you and saying, you know, they don't have to be the things that dictate it for me, I can dictate what they say back. And so I'm just really thankful for having been able to sit down and kind of partake in this moment. It's my first really big event on Mother's Day weekend, and to be honest, after this we're going to the beach with my family and I'm probably just going to log off all the, all the things that don't have to do with me creating on my own. And with that, I think it's the best part of being creative is that it allows you a space to be with yourself and to really acknowledge what this day needs to mean for you outside of the cards and the emails and everything that comes with it. And so I'm just so thankful for this space, and thank you, Hope. Thank you, Melissa, for bringing this all together, bringing us all together.
