Babbling About Getting Back To Yourself

#234: Normal days can feel like a trap after something hard. You finally laugh, enjoy lunch, or go 45 minutes without replaying the same memory, and then the guilt kicks in: “If it mattered, shouldn’t I still be devastated?” We get honest about that whiplash and why feeling better doesn’t mean you didn’t care. Healing, grief, and emotional recovery don’t require you to stay miserable as proof that the pain was real.

We also dig into the mental habits that keep us stuck, especially rumination and the never-ending “what if” loop. When an option disappears a relationship, a job, a version of life we can’t choose anymore our brains romanticize it into a perfect alternate timeline with perfect lighting and zero consequences. That fantasy competes with your real life, where the bills still exist, the laundry still needs folding, and people still disappoint each other sometimes. The point isn’t to deny the mess, it’s to stop losing your present to a timeline you never lived.

From there, we pivot into practical “getting back to you” steps: normal routines, quiet progress, putting the phone down, and asking better questions like “What do I want now?” and “What do I need to feel safe?” We talk people-pleasing, boundaries, and the relief of redirecting your curiosity inward without becoming self-critical.

If you’re somewhere between not okay and not destroyed, press play. Subscribe, share this with a friend who needs a softer landing, and leave a review so more people can find the show.

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Welcome Back And Why It’s Lighter

Johnna 0:00

What is up, everyone? Welcome back to another episode of the Babbles Nonsense podcast. I hope you can hear me. Something is going on with my headphones and I can't hear myself speaking, so I don't even know what this is gonna sound like. But welcome back. I know I missed last week. Life is life, and that's where I'll end that there. Um, but I know the last episode, which was two weeks ago, was pretty heavy. So today I just wanted to talk about what happens when life starts feeling somewhat normal again. Not because everything is like fixed or figured out in that moment, but because eventually I think we realize we're still here. We still have a life, and maybe it's time to start finding our way back to ourselves. So let's babble about getting back to you. If you're interested, stay tuned.

When Feeling Better Feels Like Guilt

Johnna 1:09

All right. So, like I was saying in the intro, I know the last episode got deep, got a lot deep. Um, and I feel like sometimes when we're going through something difficult, well, I say we, but I mean me. Um, every conversation maybe that you're having with friends or that I do on the podcast or just anyone in general that will listen to me, um, those conversations start feeling like TED talks or, you know, about healing and trauma and boundaries, grief, growth, attachment styles, all the things, right? And eventually I'm like, can I please just go get a coffee? Can I have a normal day where I don't analyze anything? Don't analyze why I didn't do anything, why I sat in silence, why I didn't talk to anybody. And it's like, can we just have one normal day where that happens? I don't know. Like, does getting oat milk mean that I have abandonment issues? Like things like that. Probably it does. Who knows? According to the internet, everything and everyone has trauma, trauma responses, childhood trauma, all the things we've talked about it all on the podcast. But I have been thinking a lot lately about what happens after you go through a hard season. Unfortunately, I'm still in my hard season, so I haven't quite made it out yet, but it's getting there because I do think eventually, even if everything isn't completely resolved in the moment, life starts happening again. Well, life never stops if we're being completely honest. We have to start doing things. We still have to do things like laundry and go to work. You know, maybe your dog needs something, maybe your kid needs something, you have to clean your house, um, pay your bills, run errands, go get groceries. All these things still have to be done. And if you have friends that can help you, a great family support system, or a great partner that can help you, that is amazing. And I think through all of that, we realize like, oh, I do actually have an entire life outside of this thing that I've been thinking about constantly that's life right now. And I think that realization can feel strange because when something does, you know, happen that's somewhat big to you or in your life, or maybe dramatic or traumatizing or whatever it is, especially something in the emotional realm, it can become the center of your entire world for a while. I think, well, for me, I can't speak for you, but I know that I like when I'm going through something difficult, I wake up thinking about it, or I go to sleep thinking about it. And then maybe I'm at work talking to colleagues about it or my friends about it, you know, talking to God about it, praying about it. It's looping in my mind, ri ruminating, ruminating, ruminating, I don't know. You figure it out. Um, maybe your friend is Chat GPT and you chat GPT things 47 times. And when I say maybe you, I'm talking about maybe me. And then it's the same question just over and over, but maybe it's slightly different wording, because apparently the first 46 answers that everyone else gave you wasn't emotionally satisfying enough. But I think that eventually one day comes and you realize that you did something normal, like go to the gym or go get lunch with a friend, and you laughed for the first time after a hard situation. And for like 45 minutes afterwards, you didn't think about it. That one hard thing, you got to, your your brain got to emotionally escape from it for a minute. And then sometimes our brains do this really ridiculous thing where it goes, wait a minute, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You were happy for a second. Are we allowed to be happy in this moment? Shouldn't we still be emotionally devastated by the trauma that you went through last week? And I think that's something we don't really talk about. I know I say that a lot on the podcast, and maybe it's because I'm not looking in the right places, but sometimes feeling better in hard situations can almost make you feel guilty. I mean, I I know that's how I have felt sometimes. Like if something really mattered to you, shouldn't you still be sad about it? Or if you love someone enough, shouldn't you still miss them constantly? If something hurt you, shouldn't you still be affected by it? And obviously there's no timeline for grieving or, you know, whatever you're going through, a hard life situation. But I've started realizing that moving forward does not erase what happened. Laughing does not mean it didn't matter. Having a good day doesn't mean you didn't care. And healing does not require you to remain miserable as proof that something was important. I think sometimes we accidentally confuse suffering with significance, like if I stop hurting, maybe it means it wasn't real. And that's just simply not true. You can appreciate something, miss something, grieve something, or learn from something traumatic in your life, and also eventually go eat Mexican food and have a margarita with your friends and laugh and still enjoy life. Or depending on your life choices, I know mine was the Mexican food and having margaritas, whatever you want to insert there in your life, you know, balance. But lately I've been trying to figure out what getting back to myself actually looks like. And I don't mean this in some like inspirational kind of way. Like, for example, I'm not saying like today I woke

Stop Romanticizing The Lost Option

Johnna 6:46

up at 4:30 and I journaled for two hours and I meditated and I drank chlorophyll, water, da-da-da-da-da-da. Whatever. No, absolutely not. Because that sounds exhausting. I'm just talking about simple, normal, mundane things, getting back into my gym routine, starting to meal prep, actually washing my hair, cleaning my house, going to see friends, maybe reading a book, maybe listening to a podcast, driving somewhere without turning, you know, turning that drive into this emotional documentary where you're looping and reminding yourself of everything that you just went through. Or just remembering, like, oh yeah, I did exist before this thing. I had interests before this. I had plans and goals and a sense of humor before all of this happened. And I think sometimes when we're hurting, we actually accidentally turn the pain into our entire identity. Everything becomes about a relationship or a breakup, a decision, job, loss, whatever happened, whatever you're grieving, like I said, whatever traumatic event that may have taken place in your life. And I don't think we necessarily mean to do this. I think it's just consuming. Our brain wants to solve it, it wants answers, and our brain most of the time wants closure, or maybe it wants someone to explain exactly why everything happened because it's trying to protect you. And I know again, Mean You has talked about this on the podcast before where it's just trying to tell stories to make sense of something that maybe doesn't really make sense. But unfortunately, life is just rude like that. Sometimes there is no neat explanation, sometimes there is no dramatic final conversation that we see in movies. You know, sometimes nobody comes back and says, You were right. Here is your certificate and here's your emotional validation, and you, you know, handled that perfectly. That's just it's not how life happens. We kind of like when we watch movies and things like that and we see endings and how things go, we sometimes I think can get caught up in that and think, like, why can't that be life? That's just the ending is in this perfect little bow and we know why everything happened, which would honestly be very helpful if you ask me. But I think sometimes you just have to keep living without having every answer, which is really hard for me being a control freak. Um, but I'm learning that there's a difference between processing something and living inside of it, which processing is probably the more healthy thing to do. And then thinking about what happened or learning from it, you know, talking about it with safe people, praying about it, going to therapy if you need to, and just having a core group of people that you just feel safe with can all be good. But there's also a point where you can accidentally start circling that same question just over and over, like why did this happen? What if I had done something differently? What if I had said this instead? What if I had waited? What if I hadn't waited? What if they change? What if they don't? What if I regret this? What if I don't? You know, those are most of the questions that loop through my brain over and over on repeat. And my brain is just trying to give it an answer that makes sense. And like I said, sometimes the answer just doesn't make sense. But you'll realize sometimes that you've spent hours mentally arguing with this version of your life that never existed or wasn't going to exist. You know, meanwhile, you have your clothes in the dryer and you still need to get your laundry done, which honestly just feels very disrespectful that the laundry can't fold itself. I don't know about you, but I'm just saying. Like, can someone else come fold these clothes or can we invent a dryer at some point to fold clothes? We all know that we don't mind putting clothes in the washer and transferring them to the dryer. It's the folding. Anyways, that's another soapbox. Um, but I've also noticed something else that we really romanticize options once they disappear. This is one of the weirdest things I feel like humans do. I want to know the neuroscience behind it, honestly, because you can be completely uninterested in something or someone, and then suddenly that option is gone, and now you're like, wait, wait a minute. Did I want that? I'm never, you know, for example, like when I cut my hair into bangs, bangs are a great example. Any woman can relate to this. You know, we don't ever really go, oh yeah, give me some bangs. I mean, maybe somebody does, but like we see it on someone else, and then maybe we have a huge life change, and we're like, I want bangs, you know, or maybe you're like, I've never wanted bangs. Tell me tomorrow that I can never have bangs again, and then suddenly I'm watching YouTube tutorials with scissors in my hands, which I'm not even lying. I did this one time myself. And another example would be like maybe you see a house that you don't even want, or you do want it, but you know you can't afford it, maybe it's too expensive, or maybe it's farther out than you wanted to live, or the wrong neighborhood, or maybe the kitchen is very old and looks very 2004. And you're like, I don't really have the money to remodel that. But then you leave the house, someone else buys it, and suddenly you're like, well, maybe that house really did have potential, maybe I could have made it work. You know, apparently I was going to raise a family there, even though I don't really want a family. I don't know, who knew? You know? There's another example of like job interviews, and you think, I'm gonna interview for this job. I don't even know if I want this job, I have a great job. Then they hire somebody else and didn't even pick you, and suddenly you were deeply offended. Like, hold up, excuse me. That was my job, that was my position. And I really think like with these examples and just like talking them out, I think sometimes losing options make us romanticize the version of life that could have existed inside a what-if moment. We could what-if ourselves to death. And it's not because we necessarily wanted it, but because now we can't know what would have happened if we chose differently. And the brain loves, well, my brain loves, an alternative timeline, especially because an alternative timeline always gets edited so beautifully. You know, like nobody imagines the alternative timeline where everything went terrible. Like you moved into that house, you, you know, you lost your job, you couldn't remodel, then you find mold or something. Like you don't imagine that. What if you imagine, oh, it was gonna be beautiful, I was gonna have this family that I've never even wanted, and then I was going to update everything and add on to everything. No, you know, that's just not what our brains do. Our imaginary alternate life has this perfect lighting. You know, everyone communicates, nobody gains weight, the house is always clean, everyone's behaving, you're financially secure, your skin looks amazing. Um, somehow we have endless vacation times in our imaginary life, and nobody is getting on your nerves, nobody's being annoying, which is how you know it's fictional because life does not happen like this. Life is not perfect, it's messy. If we all keep looking at Instagram and see this perfect Instagram life of people, it's just not real. I'm not gonna say that people don't have happy lives or that they don't live good lives, and maybe bad things don't happen to them at the moment, but life is messy. And I think part of getting back to ourselves is learning to stop competing with imaginary versions of our own lives, more or less anyone else online, or your friends or neighbors or whatever, whoever else you're imagining your version being compared to. Because in the end, when we do that, we're the ones that are losing because our real life still has those bills that have to be paid. You're gonna have bad hair days, you're not gonna wash your hair on some days. There's gonna be miscommunication between, you know, friends, partners, colleagues. You're gonna get in traffic and cuss up a storm. You know, if you're a woman, you're gonna have raging hormones at times. Um, if you're a man, maybe your testosterone's law. I don't want to leave you out on the hormones part, but unexpected expenses can come. You know, people will disappoint you. You may disappoint yourself. The imaginary life has none of that because you invented it to be perfect. Of course, that imaginary life looks good, but you didn't get to live that timeline. You have the one that you have. And I don't mean that in a sad way. I actually think that can be very freeing if we stop what ifing ourselves to death. And I know I'm really speaking to me in this moment because eventually it may make us stop asking, like, what would

Quit Competing With Imaginary Timelines

Johnna 15:57

have happened if I chose different differently? And it may start having us ask, you know, okay, what do I want to happen now? What do I want my life to look like from here, from this moment, from what I learned from? What do I want more of? What do I want less of? Who do I want around me? What makes me feel like myself? Have I neglected myself? Have I neglected someone else? What have I been putting off? What does actually make me laugh? Where do I want to go from here? What do I want to learn? What do I want to learn from this process? Like all these questions can then come from your actual life. And maybe the answers don't have to be profound. Maybe the answers this week, if you're going through a hard time and you're trying to get on the other side of it, is I just want to go back to the gym today. You know, I'm gonna go home and clean out my closet and donate all my clothes to goodwill. Or maybe you're gonna take a weekend trip with your girlfriends and just let loose. Maybe it's just putting down your phone and stop checking it every four seconds. Whatever it is, all of them are legitimate goals, especially in my opinion, the phone one, because I'm really bad about that. Because I do feel like sometimes the healthiest thing we can do for ourselves is put the phone down in another room and stop looking for information that probably doesn't exist because it feeds into that what if moment. But I also think that getting back to yourself just sometimes is simply remembering who you were before you started trying so hard to understand a situation or maybe someone else. That's something that as I get on the other side, hopefully soon. I don't know, you know, life can life, but that's what I've been thinking about. Like, how much energy do I want to spend trying to figure everyone else out? Why did they say this that way? Or what do they mean by that? Do they care? Are they upset? Are they avoiding me? Are they going through something? You know, are they emotionally available? Are they secretly overwhelmed? All these questions, instead of asking about other people, is you can just focus on you and say, what do you want? How do you feel? What do you need in this moment? And I'm realizing I can spend a ridiculous amount of time trying to understand someone else and almost none of the time asking myself whether the situation is even working for me, which is kind of insane because you live with yourself, not anyone else. And that's probably because I'm a people pleaser and it wouldn't seem that way, but I am. So, like, sure, maybe I understand exactly why someone behaves the way they do in certain situations, which is congratulations to me for figuring that out, you know. Um, maybe you've earned a doctorate in someone else's behavior because you're overanalyzing them. But what have you learned about yourself? Because understanding someone does not automatically mean that you have to tolerate everything or, you know, put your own feelings aside in moments because compassion and boundaries can apparently coexist. Who knew that? Not me until recently. And maybe getting back to yourself just means redirecting some of that curiosity inward, but not in a self-critical way. So don't go the opposite, you know, in a whole nother direction. Just like what actually makes you feel good, makes you feel safe, what environments bring out the best in you, you know, try to figure out where you're constantly feeling anxious or or where you can feel like you can breathe. Um and these questions don't have to like be at the forefront of your brain. It's just something, you know, hindsight looking back, you can I can see this and say I should do this and try to do this or implement this, but we don't have to solve our entire lives in that moment, that hard time. You know, these are just good questions, I feel like. And maybe you don't agree, and that's

Quiet Healing And Coming Home To You

Johnna 20:06

okay. But I also think there's something really underrated about doing normal things while you're healing. You know, everybody feels like they just want some kind of dramatic breakthrough or okay to feel better, and sometimes there just isn't one. Sometimes it's just waking up in the morning and realizing you slept through the night or you didn't cry today, or maybe you cried one time less than you did yesterday, or maybe you went one afternoon without replaying a conversation in your head on repeat, or actually enjoying something, or maybe even laughing, which is progress, you know. I know those are not clappable moments to some, you know, there's no trophy being awarded to you. You know, maybe it's you you don't post about it on Instagram, but you can some, you know, just honestly say that you're healing in that moment, it's probably more quiet and more boring and truly almost unnoticeable until one day you can look back and realize the thing that consumed your entire brain now only visits occasionally. And I think that's the part I'm trying to embrace in the moment that I'm in, not forcing myself to be quote unquote over anything, not trying to pretend things don't hurt me, but also giving myself permission to live while things are still healing. Because I think we sometimes wait for perfect emotional closure before we let ourselves move forward. And I don't know if that ever comes. It may come for some, but I've honestly never experienced this perfect closure moment. And maybe sometimes closure is just simply realizing that something happened, you learned from it. You know, some parts of that still hurt, some questions will probably never be answered, and I still get to build a life that's ahead of me. I still have a future. And doing these simple things kind of feels more realistic to me. And I'll be very honest, I'm in much dire need for normalcy. Um I'm ready to laugh. I'm ready to talk about stupid things again. You know, I've I'm ready to go back to complaining to my friends about the most insignificant things and be the dramatic one, which who knew I was the dramatic one. I'm sure y'all have thought that. But I think that's one of the strange signs, like when you can start doing these little things is getting back to yourself. You know, you start caring about dumb things again, you start making plans with your friends, you start getting excited about something, you can start thinking about next month instead of yesterday or a week ago or two weeks ago. You can start laughing without immediately remembering that you're supposed to be sad. And I really want to remember that none of that is betrayal to myself. You know, you're not betraying you or the experience or a decision or someone else because that version of yourself was hurting, you're just continuing, and maybe just continuing life and still participating in life is enough. So if you're in some weird season where you don't feel completely okay yet, but you also don't feel completely destroyed anymore, maybe you don't have to define it. Maybe we just are somewhere in the middle, and maybe today you just do one thing that feels like you, not something productive or impressive or for anyone else, something that just makes you think, okay, I feel like myself again. There I am, because you are still you and you don't have to dramatically reinvent yourself either. Sometimes I know like that's what we do as humans is we go out and do something crazy and they call it a midlife crisis, but I really think it happens in any crisis sometimes. You feel like you need to just be different or be someone different. But sometimes you just have to slowly come home to yourself again. And yeah, anyway, that is enough emotional maturity for this episode. Maybe next week we can talk about something completely ridiculous and less emotional and less dramatic for balance. You know, there's all about balance. So I hope someone found this helpful.

One Small Step And A Share

Johnna 24:33

If you did, share it with a friend. But anyways, guys, until next time, bye.