Latest / Thinking Out Loud | Kimberly / How Do I Get Over It? | Thinking Out Loud
Transcript
- Kimberly: How do I get over it? Maybe it's because we imagine getting over some things like jumping hurdles We run towards it, you jump, and then you keep going. Hurdle cleared. Problem solved. When really maybe that's the problem the whole time. Sometimes I hear people giving healing a time limit. You should be over it by now. That depends. sometimes moving on takes a while because there's a lot to unpack. Sometimes you give yourself a pep talk and say, How about we go clubbing next Friday? Both can be moving on. Both can be moving forward. I think we simplify what it means to get over something. I think we confuse disappointment with grief. Sometimes something happens and you think, well, the show must go on. Sometimes something happens and it changed the shape of your life. That kind of grief can be heavy to hold. Sometimes you have to build the muscle to have the capacity to even carry it to move forward. Maybe the question isn't how do I get over it? Maybe the question is what would moving forward look like for me? Welcome back to Thinking Out Loud. Hi, it's me, Kimberly. Before we begin a quick note, this podcast is for reflection and conversation, not professional advice. Take what resonates and leave the rest. here we slow down and explore life's gray areas, especially in relationships and behavior patterns we can observe and reflect on. I am not here to tell you what to think. I am here to offer framework to help you understand your relationships, strengthen your thinking, and hold space for complexity. Let's get to thinking out loud. Recently I had a conversation with my bestie. Of course I have to bring her up. I gotta name drop her. Well, her title. Because she's a celebrity in my eyes. Anyway, she's been telling me about something her therapist said. Put a time limit on it. Feel the pain. But don't let it run your life. Now now, I understand the deeper meaning behind what the therapist meant. I really do. I was annoyed by it. Not the deeper message, the vagueness. Because people are desperate to heal. They're desperate to escape their pain. When you tell someone to put a time limit on it, I worry some people are gonna hear I must not be trying hard enough. Why am I still upset? Why can't I just get over this? And then the cycle continues. No no. We don't do that here. We use critical thinking and think out loud. In the end, my Bessie and I got curious with one another and we had a back and forth about it. Not to prove the other person wrong. We wanted to understand the other person's points. that's when we realized something. What she needed versus what I needed was looking completely different. It doesn't make either of us a wrong. Sometimes I do need to put a time limit on a disappointment. Sometimes she needs to give herself grace while untangling trauma and grief. We're both right. The therapist is right. I still told her I'm gonna write about this because it made me so mad. Meaning just the vagueness of it inspired me. My muse. There are people out there thinking they're chronic whiners, that they're being dramatic and that they're taking too long, and sometimes that's not true at all. Sometimes you are never allowed to grieve. The things that mattered to you. You didn't even have your moment to be upset. You were expected to treat something significant to you like it was simply a disappointment. And I don't get to decide what is a disappointment to you versus what is grief. One person, infertility might just be a disappointment. For another, it might be profound grief. Losing a job might feel like an opportunity to start something new for one person, but for someone else, it might feel like their entire future plan disappeared. A friendship ending might be something you just shrug off. For someone else, that friendship might have been ten years of memory support, a person they thought they would have in their life forever. Finding out that you can't eat gluten might. be a relief for one person? Finally, the answer I've been needing to explain all my problems. For someone else, it might be grief. Suddenly, the food they grew up with, eating, the traditions surrounding those foods, restaurants with their friends, holiday meals, birthday cakes. All of it has to change. a loss doesn't become less real. Because someone had to be happy to have the answer. That's the point. You don't get to decide what matters to people. You don't get to decide what shouldn't hurt. You don't get to decide what someone is allowed to grieve. For me, losing my animals, it took me a week to process. And at the same time, someone telling me I don't want to be your friend anymore? Okay. That's painful. I'm probably going to process that very differently. That's okay. I might go out and karaoke. Even something as simple as getting a B on a quiz can mean completely different things to two people. For one person, it's a celebration. To another, it might trigger an entire horror movie of shame, fear, expectation, and grief. The grade is the same, but the meaning isn't. And I think that's something we forget. Get when we talk about getting over things. We focus on the events itself and we forget to ask: what did this event mean to you? Sometimes the pain isn't about what happened, it's about what the thing represented. The future you imagined, the people you thought you had forever, the version of yourself you thought you'd become, the life you thought you were building. If that's what someone is grieving, telling them to just move on doesn't empower them, not necessarily. Sometimes empowerment means helping people believe they can move forward, that they are capable to building that muscle and handle their grief, to have the capacity to move forward. You cannot empower someone by minimizing their reality. You encourage someone to keep living without telling them. They shouldn't still be hurting to get over it. Like, my goodness. You can remind someone that their life is bigger than the moment without pretending this moment doesn't matter. Maybe the goal isn't to decide whether someone has spent too much time grieving. Maybe the goal is to help them figure out what moving forward actually looks like for them. For me, getting dumped or broken up with someone wasn't always. The grief most people assumed it was. people will tell you that you're grieving the person or the relationship and or the person that they made you feel you could be. Sometimes, no. When one guy told me, Kimberley, I found someone else, okay, That wasn't grief over not being chosen. sadly I was used to that. What I agreed was losing his sister as a friend. Some of that was my own fault. I couldn't stand being around her brother and I wasn't allowed the same freedoms to be at her house anymore Because of circumstance of dating him. I wasn't allowed the same freedoms to be at her house anymore because I had dated him at one point. So now, you can't sleep over at her house or be there alone anymore, Kimberly. losing access to a place that had once felt like freedom before the breakup, before the people in charge of me decided I wasn't allowed to go over there anymore because I had been dating her brother. I didn't lose a boyfriend. He was a guy looking for a good time. Not committed anyways. I was losing my friendship with her. I was breaking a promise that we would be friends no matter what. I was grieving the freedom her home represented. I was grieving her. Not him. I think that's important because if someone had looked at me on the outside and said, Kimberly, You're having a hard time getting over this guy. I would be wondering, am I? Because that's not what I was crying about. Then there's another relationship. I wasn't upset because my ex-boyfriend broke up with me after I dyed my hair and cut it. I wasn't sitting around thinking, my goodness, he doesn't think I'm beautiful anymore. I was angry. Because he had to tear me down as a woman. He put beliefs in my head that I had never consented to about what it meant to be a woman and a mother. And then years later, I still had to untangle some of those beliefs with my husband and my girls. I wasn't grieving him and I wasn't holding a grudge against him. I was grieving my motherhood and my personhood I was grieving my safety. because he wouldn't leave me alone. He still had to be wherever I was for years. The relationship ending wasn't the part that hurt me. Feeling like I couldn't escape him was. that's a different kind of grief. Then there was my last boyfriend before my husband. By the time I realized I was tired of tolerating emotional abuse and neglect, I was ready to be done. I wasn't grieving the relationship. I wanted out. He did not treat me nicely. What I was grieving was the vulnerability he exploited in me. At one point he literally told me, I think I can make someone bipolar, Kimberly. Like I was some little science experiment. My husband helped me process that one too, and he showed me what it looked like for someone to love me, to empower me, to actually want good things for me. To say, yeah, he was crazy. Because yes, my husband and his former roommate were friends, and before anyone judges me, I didn't date my husband until nine months after I broke up with his roommate, because I was literally all I might be dating him for revenge. I need to wait. I need to figure out if I even like this guy. Eventually. I got with his roommate. My ex's roommate. My husband. And truthfully, I'm over most of that relationship, except I think I will forever be traumatized by how painfully dry that man made his enchiladas. Sometimes some traumas are too funny to let go. where we all can get behind and say boo How dare you make dry enchiladas? Unless that's your thing, please though. Don't ever make me enchiladas if you make them dry. I will do anything for love, but I won't do that. Anyways, my point is people can look at a breakup and assume you're grieving the person and sometimes you are. Sometimes you're grieving something else entirely. I wasn't Robert Baratheon from Game of Thrones sitting around desperately in love with the idea of a woman he barely knew. Liana Stark. She was just not that into you, dude. However, Cersei and him, they were a match made in nightmares. Matching energies. I mean, they were like 180 matching, like complete opposites, both toxic. I digress. My point is that I wasn't grieving the man. I was grieving what I lost. I was grieving my friendship with one sister. She was a baddie, and I still miss her. I was grieving the version of womanhood I had before someone made me ashamed of it. I was grieving the safety I lost. I was grieving the freedom I associated with the place. I could no longer go. And most importantly, I was grieving a baddie I used to be before a man decided to treat me like a personal thesis project. How can I make this woman lose her mind? So when someone asked why aren't you over him yet? Sometimes a better question is, are you actually grieving him? Or are you grieving what happened to you? What you lost, what you believed, who you are, what you thought your life was going to look like. the grief is somewhere else entirely. I have moved on from a lot of things. I got over my exes, the trauma they exposed from my own upbringing, the parts I'm still untangling. not feeling wanted, being treated like a burden, being lied to, being isolated before I even realized there was a whole story about me going around. Not being chosen. Being told who I was by insecure people. There are things I'm learning to carry while still moving forward. that's a very different process. people who aren't safe, I accept that pretty quickly. I have no problem stonewalling if I have to coexist with them. I can be at peace with the idea that I will never have to deal with the BS ever again. Dobby is free, Harry Potter. Bye bye. Building my skills around what healthy relationships look like. Still in the works. Repairing the capacities I didn't have the chance to develop. That's a process. I think that's what healing truly is sometimes. Not fixing yourself, not becoming a completely different person. Building the things you didn't have the opportunity to build before. learning what safety feels like when your body only ever knew that safety was chaos. Learning how to tolerate rejections without immediately collapsing into, see, I'm a burden again. Learning how to trust without abandoning yourself. Learning how to have conflict without assuming the relationship is over. Learning how to be loved without constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop. Those things take time. Your nervous system doesn't necessarily get the memo simply because your brain understands something. what if moving on isn't about getting rid of our grief? What if moving on is about building our capacity to carry our grief and still move forward? if you don't have the muscles yet, where do we get help to build it? Therapy helped me. Heck. Group therapy even better. Having a whole community and people who just get it. both truly helped me see what life could feel like when I had learned to thrive. eventually it became time to leave. I realized at that point I was reliving my pains simply to have something to talk about in therapy. At some point I needed to take what I had learned and go live my life. Sometimes that's the part nobody talks about. Sometimes healing isn't about spending another hour spent analyzing what happened. Sometimes healing is Showing up. Trying. Having the awkward conversations. Making a friend. Leaving the house. Laughing again. Going to work. Being yourself. Doing something you enjoy. Learning to live life again. That means showing up. while you're still hurting. I've cried in the car. I've had moments where I held it together until I got home. I've done things and then completely lost it afterwards. And I don't think that means I failed at moving forward. I think sometimes that's what moving forward looks like. Physical therapy helped me understand this differently. After having my first child, I had lost a lot of muscle and physical abilities during that time. I couldn't walk into a gym and expect my body to perform like it used to. I had to build the muscles back slowly, consistently, and sometimes embarrassingly. Healing can be like that too. You don't shame a muscle for being weak, you train it. You don't scream at yourself because you can't lift the weight you used to. You start where you are. You build capacity and sometimes you need help. A trainer, a therapist, a friend, a coach, a partner, a community, a book club. Someone who can help you figure out where you're struggling and how to strengthen it. You know your limits. Or at the very least, you're willing to start to figure out where your capacity begins and ends. I think that's the beginning of moving forward. Not pretending the grief isn't there. Not forcing yourself to be okay. Not making your pain your permanent home either. Learning how to carry what happened without letting it carry you. We can't pretend grief isn't there. We can't let go of disappointment. we can accept that some things didn't go the way we wanted or hoped for. We can say that sucks, then go to karaoke. we can put on an outfit. We can go dancing next Friday. And sometimes that's healing too. grief is different. Grief is something we learn to carry. Maybe getting over it was never the goal. maybe the goal was to build enough capacity to carry what happened and still choose to move forward. Back to the question, how do I get over it? Maybe the answer isn't about getting over everything. Maybe the first question is, what am I grieving? Is this simply disappointment? Is this grief? Did I lose a person, a relationship, a future I imagined, a sense of safety, a friendship, a version of myself? I think sometimes we're trying so hard to get over something that we haven't even figured out what we're trying to get over. Maybe that's why the hurdle metaphor doesn't quite work. Because grief isn't always an obstacle sitting in front of you. Sometimes it's something you're carrying. If that's the case, maybe healing isn't about putting it down forever. Maybe it's about becoming strong enough to carry it without letting it carry you. Instead of asking, why am I not over this yet? Maybe ask, what am I grieving? What would moving forward even look like if I didn't have to pretend this didn't hurt? And maybe most importantly, what capacity do I need to build so I can carry this and still live my life? Sometimes that capacity is emotional. Sometimes it's learning how to tolerate rejection. Learning how to trust again. Or if you've never learned how to trust, how to even begin. Learning how to leave people who aren't safe without feeling like you have to convince them to understand you. Learning that conflict doesn't automatically mean abandonment. Learning how to receive love without waiting for it to disappear, and sometimes the capacity you need is simply enough to put on an outfit and go dancing next Friday. You are allowed to grieve and still have fun. You are allowed to cry in a car and still show up. You are allowed to miss someone and know that you don't want them back. You are allowed to understand what happened to you without making what happened to you the rest of your life. You're allowed to move forward before every piece of that past feels completely resolved. I think that's the middle ground. Not rushing yourself through grief, not building a permanent home inside of it either. We can acknowledge the pain. We can learn from it. We can get help carrying it. We can build the muscle we didn't have before. Eventually maybe we realize I don't have to get over what happened to me to move forward from it. I have to learn how to carry it differently. Disappointment can be something we release. Grief is something we learn to carry, and sometimes moving on isn't crossing a finish line. It's realizing we can keep walking Even while carrying something heavy. If you're listening to this and wondering why you can't get over it yet, maybe don't start with the deadline. Start with curiosity. What are you grieving? What did that loss mean to you? What do you need to build so that you can keep living while you carry it? You don't have to answer all of that today. Maybe that's where moving forward begins, not with forgetting, not with pretending, and not forcing yourself to be okay. rather with understanding what you're carrying, deciding where you're going next. My question for you, what are you really grieving? What would moving forward look like if you stop measuring it by how little you hurt? What is one capacity you could start building that might make carrying this a little easier? Sometimes healing isn't about becoming someone who never hurts again. Sometimes it's becoming someone who knows I can hurt, I can grieve, I can ask for help. I can still live. Whether you leave a comment, send me a message, or simply sit with the question yourself. I hope this conversation stays with you. Thank you for slowing down and thinking out loud with me. Until next time, take care of yourself. Remember, you don't have to get over everything to move forward. Sometimes healing is learning that you can carry what happened without letting it decide where you go. I'll see you in the next episode.