#26 - When everything changes (including you)…what now?

For episode 26, I sat down after a conversation and a bit of a spiral, to be honest, and just hit record. I didn’t have a structure, or a clear point, I just had a lot of thoughts that felt like they needed somewhere to go.

This episode is about what happens when something in your life changes you to the point where you don’t recognise yourself anymore.

The shift in how you see yourself.

The way your relationships change.

The drop in your tolerance for things you used to accept.

And the uncomfortable reality that not everyone is going to understand the version of you that comes out the other side.

I speak a lot about grief in this episode, but more as the catalyst, not the whole story.

It’s really about change, identity, and the refinement that happens when life forces you to look at everything differently.

There’s also a real conversation around self-worth, emotional responsibility, and the moment you realise that what you thought was strength… might have actually been avoidance.

Just an honest conversation about becoming someone new, and learning how to navigate that when nothing feels familiar anymore.

Thanks for tuning into That Makeup Gal! If you loved what you heard, be sure to hit subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you’re feeling generous, drop a review—it helps more people find the show. Connect with me on Instagram @thatmakeupgal.pod for more behind-the-scenes moments, tips, and all the good vibes. Until next time, keep being unapologetically you bb!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

G'day folks, and welcome to That Makeup Gal. I'm gonna be completely honest right now. Um, this is probably the most like spontaneous episode I've ever attempted to record, and I don't know where it's gonna go. Um I just had a a massive sort of emotional download, I guess. And I started thinking about things and processing them, and I was having really big thoughts, and I thought, fuck it, this is exactly why I have or wanted to have a podcast so that I could have open conversations like this. And yeah, so um I guess this is gonna be my first attempt. So uh the big thoughts this morning came after I had just had a conversation with a friend of mine. We're trying to tee up like a guest spot on the podcast, and I really want to start doing more things like that. Um, sharing the conversations and the space here with other people, um, and expanding that relatability, I guess. Um, and yeah, I'm really excited for that. Anyway, it got me thinking about change and the change that occurs when really painful things happen in your life. Not just a like you changing and the world changing around you, it's the acceptance of you as the new you. Um, because that often happens as well. And yeah, a lot of people talk about it, but it's not from the sort of learned understanding place of a why change occurs, b why it sort of sticks around and how to handle that, how to navigate that. I've spoken a lot about the fact that you know, post-traumatic events, you often have to get to know yourself or your new situations or your new surroundings, whatever it might be, you have to get to know that again. Like, grief for me was one of those things that I always heard other people talk about, like the the division in their life, post and pre-grief. Like my life was one way before that loss, and then the day that that happened, I became a completely different person, or became or I became unraveling into a different kind of person. And I guess I went from somebody who felt the immense intensity of everything around me. I felt obliged to feel everything around me, to be responsible for that, to be responsible for bringing most situations back to a baseline. Um, and my dad always used to say, Why are you doing this? Like you've got to sort of prioritize yourself. And I'm, I would never say it out loud, but I knew it was because I knew I could handle it. Yeah, I I I told myself it's because I knew how to handle it. I knew that my resilience was, you know, I had the ability to just kind of go, fuck it, whatever, I'll be fine. And in hindsight, because hindsight is your fucking best friend, is so bad. That is so complete avoidance. Saying, fuck it, I can handle it, whatever. No, you can't. You're just avoiding it and you're trying to control it so that nobody else gets hurt. Basically, I can now see many years on that I didn't value myself at all, and I valued everyone and everything around me more than myself. So, what that meant was when things were painful in other people's lives, I took it on board to fix it, and I took it on board to minimize it because to repeat myself, I knew I could handle it. And the people in my life that were experiencing that pain, they couldn't. So I took it from them and I didn't do anything about, you know, safely handling it, I just absorbed it. And then what happens when you are that kind of person, which is let's be frank, really emotionally irresponsible, is something like the death of a parent takes you by surprise, or whatever it might be, something big and cataclysmic happens in your life, and all of that stuff that you have stashed and suppressed unknowingly comes to the surface. And it's really confronting because not only do you deal with the pain of the situation, you're now looking at your life and going, I have fucking tortured myself. I have allowed myself to be in situations and rooms with people who did not value me. I've allowed myself to be taken complete advantage of. And then the minute that all of that stuff gets shifted, the world around you doesn't know how to handle it. And I just want to remind you that that's okay. We're not here to be understood by people. It is so beautiful when you are, but I'll also remind you that most of the time nobody else understands you better than you understand yourself. The fact is, you should, if you have the ability to, be the only one who understands you entirely. And sometimes, you know, we meet parts of ourselves that we don't understand, and that's where therapy can help, that's where whatever, take that as you will. But it's so important that you prioritize yourself as the one who understands yourself the most. Because when things like this happen, you don't have anyone to lean on for many reasons. That's not a victim statement at all. It is because life becomes so fucking different. And I think I realized this morning that so many factors contributed to me changing, to me um wanting to understand myself differently, to wanting to understand people around me differently, looking at things and going, why did you do that? Like, I have experienced a lot of things. And in the grand scheme of life, not that bad. I completely understand that. But if you have people in your life that make you feel like they minimize your experiences because people have had it worse, in and and I'm not talking people who are trying to expand your perspective and kind of bring you back to reality. That's important. We need that. But people who try to minimize it by saying, Yeah, we're on a big problems in the big bad world, you should try fucking living a day in my life, and it's like, okay. And of course, I never ever ever dismiss the fact that there are many people in the world that are going to have experienced life differently and more severely than yourself or whoever. But if we constantly compared our existences, which don't get me fucking started on that topic, but if we constantly compared our emotional experiences to those around us and and made a way to invalidate our experiences because someone else had experienced more, that's wild. That's just asking for a whole fucking society of people who are suppressing big things. And like, can we not? We have to be able to validate things, and sometimes that validation comes from you. People sort of feel like they need to search for that validation. I probably did, to be honest. I was so desperate to have people tell me that this was gonna be okay because I fucking had no clue. I didn't know if I was gonna come out of the other side of that haze. There were nights where I was pacing my apartment thinking, how the fuck does this get better? I would stand in my lounge room and stare out to the Anzac Memorial Walk, which I can see from my place, and think, maybe that's the answer. Maybe that is what the next step is. I processed so much after my dad died, and most of the processing came from the fact that I had invalidated my entire existence. And I could blame the people around me, I could blame the world around me, but I'm gonna blame no, I'm going to take accountability for that because I allowed it to happen. I allowed my existence to be minimized and diminished because of my lack of self-worth and my belief that it didn't matter if I was hurting, because what did I have? You know, I didn't have kids, I don't have much to worry about. I'll be fine. I can sit at home and stare at the Anzac Bridge and fantasize about something really fucking dark because I know I'll wake up tomorrow and I'll get on with it. Like with the suppression and the emotional suppression and the emotional not suppression, it was dismissing my own emotional needs and feelings and all of it. And what I realized happened was I had been someone up until that point that felt everything around me. I felt it. I I still do. I am very emotional and I cry at happy things and things catch me off guard all the time. But I would feel it and absorb it and take it on as my own and then unpack it and try and get to the bottom of it and then get on with it. And then when dad died, or when you know, whatever happens in your life that is severely traumatic or life-changing, life-altering, whatever the fuck you want to call it, the perspective shift is that it's like, okay, I'm not doing this anymore. And the perspective shift didn't happen immediately. The perspective shift came on the other side of me basically feeling like I was in a catatonic state. I was so fucking numb. I was completely flawed by it. I had no what felt like no emotional ability. And then I realized I don't respond to things the same way that I did. And you know, could I call it my care factor changing? Maybe, but could we empower that care factor changing and go, well fucking done, that your care factor shifted from it being entirely highlighted by everyone else's needs and wants of you, and shifting that back to me. That's actually fucking amazing. However, what happens is because that is such a huge shift in your life, and people unfortunately and understandably see that as a selfish move because you are completely uh what appears to be avoidant, uncontactable, whatever. Your well, my care factor went from 10,000 and as I said, I'm repeating myself, prioritizing everyone and everything else, to zero. And of course, anything in life that goes from 10,000 to zero is gonna have you know repercussions, and that often means loss, especially after grief or whatever. You know, you lose things, people disappear, life changes, whatever might happen. Any podcast, interview, whatever you might be watching that is around the topic of grief will say that that happens after the loss. And I think I'm finally at the place where I understand and accept all of why that happened and why it needed to happen. Not my dad dying, why the processing after that needed to happen. And I was saying to mum yesterday, it's amazing that like I'm navigating new territory with having like such intense depression and depressive episodes, and um it's more than grief, it's more than that. It is it's pretty bad. And like I'm I'm working on it, it's not just there. But I was saying to mum, like, I had become so accustomed to dealing with myself in my heightened anxious state, and masking that so much that nobody knew, and I was everyone's saviour and I was everybody's power and I was everyone's strength that people don't take you seriously when you are competent and emotional, emotionally strong for others, that they find it hard to believe that you couldn't also be that for yourself, and I get it. But I had become so accustomed to dealing with that feeling and accepting that you know the way that people perceived me or whatever, that it was like my baseline. And then when depression came and kind of grief entered the chat, I realized that I don't have anxious thoughts anymore. I don't have that rumination or that need to villainize myself. My my anxiety or whatever the fuck you want to label it, those thoughts, every day, every second of the day, I had an internal voice that was, you know, ruminating, stressing, worrying about what I said, worrying about what I did. Have I come off too strong? Have I come off not enough? What am I doing? Oh my god, was I rude to that wedding vendor? The photographer just took a photo of me. Yuck, I'm disgusting. Every single thing in my mind was rumination and it negative rumination. Um, and I wouldn't I wouldn't say paranoid, but like there were obsessive ruminations 24-7. And when that stopped, because grief kind of superseded that, and depression superseded that, I was like, I don't know how to feel right now because I'm so relieved that I don't have this hyper, hyper, hyper mind, but it's also gone to the polar opposite of that, where I am unable to get out of bed. I'm unable to communicate. I could go to work and I could put that front on for six to eight hours, you know, in front of people and smile and laugh, and then I was back to ground zero. And there's something really empowering, as I said at the beginning, about what happens when you go from 10,000 to zero. And although the world around you doesn't know how to cope with that, you will find a way to cope with that and find a positive out of that. I am so fucking proud, I don't want to say proud of myself because the only reason that the anxiety has eased is because something fucked happened and you know it kind of took over that. But the perspective shift and the post-grief clarity that I talk about all the time is like it it forces you to make changes because it's it just happens, it's not an intentional thing at first, and then it becomes an intentional thing because you're like, Holy fuck, this is my new life now. I need to get better at this, I need to understand that this isn't gonna go anywhere or that this isn't gonna change. This is the new me and the new baseline. Like, get comfortable, find a way to make this fucking work. Change comes with many things, including fear, um confusion. But change can also come with lots of positivity. And as my dad always said, if you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got. Do what you've done, get what you've got. If you want different results, do a different thing, and sometimes life does that for you. And I just want to encourage people to not sway away from that. If something happens in life that changes the direction of things, resistance is what makes us uncomfortable. And don't get that twisted because I get it. Jesus, I resisted the fact that my dad had died. Like that's impossible. There's gonna be resistance in everything because resistance can be disbelief, resistance can be um denial, whatever. Resistance doesn't just have to be I refuse to whatever. But I did, I did refuse to believe that my dad had died, and the grief for that was when on the other side of that weird thought of this can't be true. It was like, no, this is true, he's not here anymore, and it just fucking floors you. That that's the part there, they're all the parts that make you force you rather to shift your perspective and look at things differently. And I'm here now, two years on, I'm still fucking battling every day. Like, I don't talk about that stuff as often. But what I will say is again, the pride that I feel for doing the work to actively undo the fucking v wrath that anxiety had over me. That's not the saying. Whatever. Yeah, I am proud of the fact that I no longer carry the weight of that anxiety, and I'm proud that I'm able to look at what when I once did carry that, and you know, give myself comfort and support, and what I needed in those moments, I can reflect back on and go, oh my god, the world around you didn't give it to you, and you didn't allow it because maybe your blocks were whatever. Don't blame yourself, Stevie. But for whatever reason, your environment couldn't provide what you needed, and I'm proud that I can be at a place now where when I reminisce or when I'm reflecting and unpacking and actively trying to heal those parts, I do give myself what I needed in those moments. Like, yeah, it's obviously fucking a thought, but it's really important that you do, and I think hopefully the people that listen to my podcast are also on the same page there, and this doesn't reach the ears of people that go, You're a fucking psychopath, that's imagination. Like, but it is important to me and many others that if you have to revisit certain parts of your life, you can sort of rewrite them. I I'm gonna digress for two seconds. I remember when two seconds, lol. I remember when I first broke up with my long-term partner, my brother came over and I was looking at all of our travel photos, I had everything out in like the spare room, and I was like, what do I do with this? What do I do with a life of memory memories? You know, we shared everything together, every memory of mine in my adult life had this person in it. How do I what do I do with that? And my brother was like, rewrite it, sis. You just have to rewrite it. It doesn't have to be negative, you still experience those things. And so I went out and I got myself a massive, massive, massive frame, and I printed off all of my favourite travel memories, and none of them had him in it, obviously, because that wasn't part of the rewriting, but it was above my bed for about 12 months, and it was to remind myself that you can rewrite certain parts of your life, and when things happen, it's often people often think that oh well it's in the past, doesn't matter. It's like I you can't do that. All of my memories involved him. You can't just put that in the past. That was my life. Like obviously, it is in the past, but I don't want it to just be there and sit there as a oh well, move on, do something new. It's like I wanted to still have those beautiful memories and not have that negativity because that just wasn't how I wanted to live. And the same thing with grief, and the same thing with many other things, but like revisiting the memories that come up and the trauma sometimes that comes up when you lose someone in your family. I'm talking about trauma attached to memories that weren't so good, like you know, my mum and dad separated, my brother and I didn't live together. There was lots of things that upon unpacking the grief of my dad, I also revisited, and you can't revisit things like that with resentment. You do at first. I'm just gonna correct myself. That's a human response because you think, holy fuck, how did I miss that? But then you realize that it's just life. We're all just learning, we're all just moving, and when things happen, you do have to find a way to wrap it up nicely. And for me, revisiting memories and moments was a big, big, big part of my healing. And I'm talking, I would close my eyes, and it was almost like part of my meditation to think about certain parts of my life that really hurt me that like I could I'd reflect back on and I felt something in my body come up, so I'd be like, okay, there's something there, and we need to unpack that because I'm not carrying fucking trauma anymore. Grief is enough. Grief is enough. I don't want any more than that unnecessary shit in my bag of emotions. Please. Now that I know that the world around me tells me that grief doesn't go anywhere, I'm just gonna have that in my backpack now. I don't want all this other shit. So I'd close my eyes and I would go back to that place that made me uncomfortable. And I would reflect on the situation, reflect on the people involved, reflect on what was said, reflect on how I responded to those things. And yeah, it's really, really empowering, but at the same time, as something that is that empowering, it is destroying because some. Sometimes when you revisit those things, the people involved, the environment involved, the job involved, whatever it might be, you see differently, and it's hard to come back from that. So backing yourself and hopefully the power of prioritizing yourself. And for me, I was now, because I had to. I didn't necessarily intentionally prioritize myself, but I realize now that it was I if I didn't prioritize myself, I was I was not going to survive this. And so I guess unintentionally I was prioritizing myself because I was keeping myself alive. And that was a real fucking wake-up call. Because at the other side of that, I'm like, holy shit, who's here now? Who who who understands me now? Who wants to actually get to know me? Because this is complicated, and I I don't I don't care to actually have to revisit this a million times and go over the fact that yep, my communication shifted with a lot of people and my job changed and my family dynamics shifted. And then you get to a place where you actually reflect on those things and the losses and the changes and the shifts in dynamic, whatever it might be. And for me, I had this moment where I was like, well, fucking done. Yep, there's a lot of people around you now that don't understand you and that aren't going to be able to process this massive change in your energy, in your perspective, in the way that you see things, feel things, do things. But I do. I do now. And I also know that the really important people around me do too, on a whole other level. And that refinement, which I think I've actually done an episode on, was one of the most empowering things that I've actually ever done and experienced. I didn't know that I was at the time, I didn't know that it was refinement, but again, hindsight is 2020 for everyone. And when I reflected on it, I was like, holy shit, this is it, this is what was meant to happen. Again, I repeat, not my dad dying, but the the refinement and the way that I looked at things and the the clarity that comes from that, where you go, I'm no longer finding myself having those conversations or allowing people to speak to me like that. It just doesn't happen anymore. It just doesn't because it's just a non-negotiable and it's so fucking cool. Because yeah, one of my best mates has been like pivotal in this experience for me. Not only because of how she's been for me, but I reflect on her life and the things that she's told me, and it all makes sense. Everything makes sense about her strength, resilience, all of it. And when you understand your friends on that level, or family, or whoever, everything changes because it's not surface level anymore. And that need to find rooms and places that aren't surface level is unwavering, and it's really great. So yeah, I don't know how this is gonna sound, but I hope that if anyone is experiencing or has experienced that devastation of loss or pain or change or anything, experience that you give yourself the time to heal from it however you need to, even if the world around you responds in a way of you should be doing this differently, you've got to get out of the house, you need to process this. There is validity in some of that stuff. Yes, it's important to get out of the house, go for a slow walk. As my therapist said, take the fucking walk to the letterbox slowly and enjoy that if that's all you can do, but do it. You accepting the shift in dynamics and the fact that not everybody is gonna understand it is it's okay. It's gonna be okay, it will be okay, and the reason that it will be okay is because you have your best interests at front of mind, and I don't believe that much can get in your way when that's the case. Life is still gonna happen, life is still gonna dish up some fucked up things, really fucked up things, but you are the one that has to process those situations and go, can't do anything about this. What the fuck are we gonna do? How are we gonna handle it? I remember having a conversation with one of my mates who has had uh cancer a couple of times. She recovered the first time and then it reappeared, and it's just been a fucked up journey for them. Awful, shitty fucking situations. And I was at an engagement party and we were chatting, just looking over the ocean, and she was like, dude, sometimes shit happens, and you just have to say to yourself, Am I gonna become the victim of this or am I gonna fucking find a way forward? Because I'm the victim in this no matter what, you know? Like, yep, it's happening to me. I can't change this. It's fucked, I wish I could, but am I going to allow that victim mentality to consume me, or am I just gonna live my life and find a way to find joy while I can, or that that waiting around for something to change or for you to find the great acceptance? But you do have to get to that stage of total acceptance of even the shitty stuff, because resistance again is the fucking enemy, it's the thing that twists things, it's the things that it's the thing that makes everything worse. And yeah, I'm not saying don't become the victim to it because believe me, I did. Inadvertently, I became the victim to this situation because as I said, I did not know that I was gonna come out of this. I'm still not out of it, but I'm certainly in a better place than I was. And allowing myself to be the victim in that and processing the unknown and just going, I don't like this, I don't like how it feels, I don't like how my mind is telling me that no one else has felt what I'm feeling right now, so no one could understand or empathize with me, so I was retreating from everyone because I didn't want to burden everyone, like allowing that to consume me to a point of that was entirely me allowing me to be the victim of it, and then it was like, no, how the fuck can I be the victim of some this is gonna happen again and again and again? What are you gonna do here? Am I just gonna let this pile on top of everything, on sorry, on top of one another, and then what get to the end of my life and go, oh that's it, cool. What? No, but again, I only say this stuff because I've lived it and I don't ever say this as a fucking preachy life coach, get through it, you've got to get to this place. It is hard fucking work. I'm talking about the the fact that I can now see in hindsight how things were, how things are, and that's what I speak about. It's never from a place of even when I do occasionally unintentionally say things like you need to, that's just from a place of passion. I don't actually try to, I don't ever want to sound like I'm saying this is what you have to do to get to this place of healing, because that's a load of shit. Like an absolute load of shit. It's gonna be different for everybody, it should be different for everyone. It's supposed to be. We have shared experience in situations, but the fine details in those situations and experiences are never going to be identical, and that's why it's important that we keep talking about this stuff. We share experiences, we share learnings. Something can resonate with one person, something might not resonate with anyone. It's just, you know, the polarities of grief and loss, I guess. I don't I don't know. So yeah, I might wrap it up here. I think I might um I might give myself a bit of time before I listen back to this because I really don't know how it's gonna sound. Uh, but I am hoping to the Easter bunny, it's Easter Sunday, um, that it it it makes sense and resonates because yeah. This is a hard topic. Loss and change and perspective shifts and becoming something new is uncomfortable for a lot of people. But it's not uncomfortable for me anymore. And I also have just teed up another interview which I spoke about earlier in this episode with someone who also doesn't fear change, and I think that episode is gonna be fucking epic. Uh but yeah, as I said, I'll wrap it up here, I think. Um actually, I'm just gonna say one final thing. I mentioned that it's Easter Sunday. I myself have had a really hard time consuming everything on social media. A lot of people are having babies, a lot of people have got big, big, big families, a lot of people have fucking Easter trees. I didn't even know that was a thing. Huh? Or gifts. I mean, my fondest memories are Easter Easter egg hunts with my my brother. The simplicity in that was what made it epic. Like, we didn't have a fucking Easter tree and we didn't get gifts, and it wasn't a you know a smorgasbord of food, and we just we just hung out and ate heaps of chocolate, made ourselves hyperactive, and then probably went and played in the bush and came home when the streetlights came on. I'm old. Um, but it's been really hard to kind of undo that negativity that comes with fucking hell, I'm doing something wrong if my life doesn't look like that. Like everyone's on this flex of showing how beautiful their life is. And I just want to say, if your mind goes somewhere negative because yours doesn't look like what theirs does, please try and shift that. Please, for your own sake. Obviously, I hope to God you're not saying it out loud. Sorry about that. My intro music just started playing, I don't know if that got picked up in the microphone. But yeah, for your own sake, please try and undo that. Please try and find a way to be unbelievably happy that someone else has got a different slice of life. If they're in their baby bubble, how beautiful. It doesn't have to be judged off the fact that you don't have a baby bubble. But the comparison is difficult and I'm acknowledging that because I feel it. It's tough. So whatever your long weekend looks like, whether you're sitting at home eating maccas in front of the TV on Good Friday, at myself, that's what I did. Um or if you had an epic weekend surrounded by epic amounts of family and people and nature, I love that for you. And I want to encourage anybody who had that resentment because it's normal, it's like Christmas. Every Christmas, I mo there's a lot of people on the planet that dread what they're gonna be faced with because they don't have the picture-perfect red, white, green, whatever the fucking traditional Christmas colours are, and 400 family members and heaps of babies, and that comparison can really sting. So I'm just acknowledging that I know it's there, um, but try and undo it because that's part of the acknowledgement of your situation and not allowing that to actually be projected onto someone else's situation and experience because it only hurts you, and it, you know, resentment doesn't feel good for anyone. If anything, you can reflect on what your life feels like now, and you know, give yourself a bit a bit of time to feel nice about what your life is instead of reflecting on what you don't have and comparing it to what everyone else does. So now I will wrap it up. Actually, one last thing. Nobody shows their full story. So even the ones that are showing that it's picture perfect and that we need everything that they have, and look at my life in a big shiny castle with beautiful babies and a fucking hot husband. I don't know who I'm talking about, but they're everywhere. Nobody, even them, is showing the full story. Now I'll wrap it up, folks. Thank you so much for being here. If you've made it all the way through, I really appreciate it. If you have resonated with what I'm speaking about, I see you, I feel you. It gets better, it will get better. The power, uh, what am I about to say? The power is in you. Shut up. Um, until next time, friends. I'll catch you then. Bye.