Pain Debtor

For anyone who’s ever wondered how this philosophy holds up under real grief, this is the episode for you.

After a recent heartbreak forced me to let go of a future I had quietly continued hoping for, I found myself asking a question I couldn’t shake: Who pays for this feeling? In this journal entry, I explore why every painful event seems to create an emotional invoice, what happens when the future you’re grieving can never actually be restored, and why sovereignty means accepting stewardship over the life that’s still yours to live.

Transcript

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I'm Ashley, and this is Dear Sovereign Self, my audio journal on the way I walk through life, practicing sovereignty, living from truth not wounds, and choosing alignment over self-abandonment. Here's today's entry.

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This entry is for anyone who has ever wondered how any of this philosophy holds up in real life. Again, to real pain and real grief. Because the last few weeks have been some of the most beautiful weeks of my life in a long time. Actually, I started a new job. I talked about that a couple entries ago. That has in many ways completely changed my life, restored my life, accelerated my life. My daughter is off summering and thriving. Her dad and I have somehow managed to become really solid co-parents after what was honestly one of the hardest years of my life. And I know that it sounds like I'm being hyperbolic, saying best month or best weeks of my life, worst year of my life, but I I kid you not. I kid you not. Um it's this sort of personal growth that'll lead you to do a podcast. Okay. So for the first time in a long time, I've been feeling like I could finally exhale and I've been talking about this. And I was proud of us in particular, not proud of our relationship ending, obviously, but proud of the way we'd recovered ourselves individually after its ending. I'm especially proud of the way that we'd continued showing up for our daughter, proud of the fact that two people who had hurt each other deeply had somehow found a way to become teammates again. And no, this is not my Father's Day entry because amidst all my genuine pride, new information entered the system this week. Okay, a new bombshell entered the villa. And it turns out that the first season of grieving this relationship was just that. Only the first season of that grief. And I very recently, for reasons I don't want to share too much, have needed to mourn the loss of my family as I knew it all over again. And I spent all week this past week doing that particular form of grieving. And in that I realized that I wasn't just grieving. Seriously. My mind kept asking, my mind kept asking the same questions over and over again. Where does this pain go? Who pays for this feeling I can't shake? For this immense hole left in my life, in my day, in my mood. And that's when I stumbled into an idea that I haven't been able to stop thinking about. I think every painful event creates an emotional invoice of sorts. So when reality changes in a way that we didn't choose, our minds immediately start looking for a debtor, someone to absorb the cost, the opportunity cost, specifically, and to bring in an econ here, but someone to absorb that cost, right? And sometimes that person is the person who hurt us. Sometimes it's ourselves that we are trying to get to absorb that cost, though it may not be our own. And sometimes it's people who had absolutely nothing to do with what happened. And sitting in the middle of my own heartbreak this week, I realized that maybe one of the hardest parts of becoming sovereign, or that is to say, becoming a closed emotional loop, right? We talked about this a little bit in the yes, I'm better than you episode. But in one of the hardest parts in becoming a closed emotional loop isn't in learning how not to feel pain, right? It's learning what to do when there's no obvious place for that pain to go. And sometimes even when there is an obvious place for that pain to go, right? So today I want to talk about grief at large, not necessarily my own tea, about heartbreak, about emotional accounting, especially, and why I think so much of healing really begins with one very uncomfortable question. Not what hurt me, why does it hurt, but who have I been trying to send the invoice to? I don't think I was actually grieving at first, if I'm being honest. I think I was doing accounting. I was mentally moving numbers around, trying to figure out which account this belonged in, so to speak. Should I carry it? Should he carry it? Was I grieving the relationship? Or was I grieving something else entirely? I wasn't grieving the relationship, I don't think. I was grieving the future that I had quietly oriented myself toward. And that's a completely different kind of loss because now I'm not grieving something I had, I'm grieving something I might have had. A version of my daughter's childhood that existed only as a possibility, really. And I noticed my mind start immediately doing something fascinating. It started looking for someone to pay for that. Not because I wanted revenge, not because I wanted to punish somebody necessarily, but because pain has a strange instinct. It wants an address, it wants somewhere to go, it wants to pull up, it wants someplace to land, someplace to send that bill. And I found myself asking questions that honestly I don't think any amount of intellectual philosophy could have prepared me for. Who pays for this feeling? Is it him? Is it me? Is it just life? Is this one of those moments where no one did anything wrong and yet something inside of me is still shattered irreversibly anyway? Because if that's true, if no one can actually restore what I just lost, then what exactly am I trying to collect? And I think that's the question that this entry is really about. Once I noticed myself asking, who owes this? It was like my mind had quietly opened a spreadsheet. Who pays? Who carries this? Who absorbs this cost? Because here's what's strange about pain. When something painful enters your life, your mind immediately starts looking to offload it, right? Somebody has to be responsible, somebody has to absorb this, somebody has to take this feeling off of my hands. And when I started realizing how often we do this without even noticing, bargaining with reality. Sometimes we send the invoice to the person who hurt us. You did this, you fix it. Sometimes we do send it to ourselves. I should have known. I should have seen the signs. I shouldn't have let myself believe that. Sometimes we send it to the universe. Why would this happen now? Why would this happen now? And sometimes we don't send it anywhere at all. We just keep carrying it around until the next person walks into our life. And then without realizing it, we hand them the bill. Pain doesn't disappear. It just keeps looking for somewhere to land. So that realization honestly scared me this week because I don't want my future to become responsible for my past. I don't want the next person I love paying emotional invoices they never incurred. I don't want my daughter growing up carrying parts of my heartbreak simply because she happened to arrive in it, right? I don't want to become one of those people who's forever collecting on a debt that no one standing in front of them actually owes. While all of that was happening, I wanted someone to fully appreciate what had just happened inside of me. I wanted someone to witness the collapse. Right? Which I think is normal. You don't just feel your pain. And sometimes you feel small in your pain, you feel invisible in your pain, you feel alone in your pain, and the only thing that can soothe it is for it to be witnessed. And but then even that distinction ended up mattering more than I expected because witnessing and payment are not the same thing. Someone can completely understand your pain and still be incapable of restoring what you lost to brutal realization. But understanding doesn't restore futures. Empathy doesn't restore futures. Even accountability doesn't restore futures. It acknowledges reality. It doesn't reverse it. And that's when I realized that maybe I've been asking the wrong question all along. Maybe the question isn't who owes this debt? Maybe the question is, what exactly am I trying to get back? What I wanted was my future back. That's why it hurts so much. The invoice was for the future. For time that felt promised, but that was now lost. Whether that future was ever realistic is beside the point. It was real enough that I had quietly continued orienting myself toward it. And then one day it wasn't. So it wasn't grieving the relationship. I am not, I shouldn't say it wasn't. It's it's very present. So I am not in this moment grieving the relationship itself. I'm grieving the future that I had projected onto that relationship, and no one can get that back from me. And that's the thing that absolutely unraveled in me this week because I realized I was trying to collect something that doesn't exist in anyone's currency. An apology can't restore it. An explanation can't restore it. Even perfect accountability cannot restore it because accountability can acknowledge what happened, but it cannot resurrect a future. Some people owe you an apology. They may owe you honesty. They may owe you accountability, but they do not owe you the future you lost because no one can give that back. I think that's why grief feels so disorienting, not because we don't know what happened. We usually know exactly what happened. It's because we're standing in two realities at once. The one our hearts were still living in, and the one reality has already moved into. And the grief is the walk between them. Grief is the cost of updating your internal map to match reality. So that's the part of the process I'm stepping into. Updating the map. Not changing the past, not pretending I wasn't hopeful, not pretending this doesn't hurt, just accepting that the road I thought was still on the map isn't there anymore. And then maybe that's what I was really searching for when I kept asking, again, who can I charge this to? Okay. Because if someone owed it, then maybe they could fix it, maybe they could rebuild the bridge, maybe they could put the roads back, but some roads don't disappear because someone failed. They disappear because reality changed. And reality has this brutal quality to it. It doesn't negotiate, it just is. Which means there are some losses that don't belong in accounts receivable, if you know what I mean. They belong in the cost of loving something that was real. That doesn't make the loss smaller. It actually makes it much bigger because now there's no collection agency, no judge, no settlement, no amount of money, no amount of guilt, no amount of punishment that can buy back the world you thought you were walking toward. And sitting with that, I realized something that somehow felt both devastating and strangely freeing. Maybe the deepest grief isn't the realization that someone hurt you. Maybe it's the realization that the thing you're trying to recover was never a person. It was a future. And futures can't be refunded. There's an expression people use all the time, charge it to the game. And for most of my life, I thought I knew what that meant. It meant that's life. Sometimes life is unfair, sometimes you lose, sometimes there isn't a satisfying explanation, charge it to the game, move on. But sitting with all of this over the past few days, I noticed I'd been misinterpreting that phrase because eventually I had this thought that absolutely stopped me in my tracks. What if I am the game? Not because I'm responsible for all that life throws at me, I'm not, but because after reality has settled into whatever it's going to become, I'm still the one living inside of my life. I'm still the one waking up tomorrow. I'm still the one raising my daughter. I'm still the one falling in love again someday. I'm still the one carrying whatever I decide to carry. The hardest part of approaching life the way I do, and why I opened this entry saying that this was for anyone who wondered how this philosophy holds up in person, these are two completely different jobs. Responsibility asks who caused this, but stewardship asks, now that it's here, what am I going to do with it? And those questions can have completely different answers. So when someone says charge it to the game, I'm realizing I'm just charging it to me. He may be responsible for certain parts of my pain. Life may be responsible for other parts, timing, circumstance, human limitation. There are lots of places responsibility can honestly belong. But the stewardship of this emotional pain, stewardship only has one address, mine. And I have to be really careful here because this isn't me saying that everyone should just carry their own pain and let people off the hook. That's not what I'm saying. Some people absolutely owe apologies for sure. Some people owe honesty and accountability, and those things matter. But accountability has limits because even if every apology were perfect, even if every conversation went the way I wanted, even if there were if every wrong were acknowledged, I would still have to wake up living inside of my own life. I would still have to decide whether this pain becomes wisdom or it becomes an identity, frankly, whether it becomes compassion or whether it becomes bitterness, whether it closes me or it deepens me. Because eventually every emotional invoice ends up on the only balance sheet that I actually steward. And that realization is simultaneously the worst news and the most liberating news that I have received all year. Because it means no one can do this work for me, but it also means no one can stop me from doing it either. So charge it to the game. I finally understand that phrase now because I am the game. And every loss, every joy, every disappointment, every heartbreak, every beautiful surprise becomes part of the life I'm responsible for tending. Not because I choose every chapter, but because it is still my book. And if I spend the next five years trying to collect a debt that no one is actually responsible or capable of paying, I'm not avoiding the cost, I'm compounding it actually, because every future relationship pays. Every future act of trust pays, every future moment of vulnerability pays. Every time someone genuinely loves me, they'll have to first convince me that they aren't him. And every time someone reaches for me, they'll have to wrestle with a version of me that was shaped by a debt they never incurred. So while the original wound may not have been my choice, the interest is definitely mine to pay. That's the part that feels so unfair because none of this is fair when the only step forward is given that this is reality, now what? And maybe that's what I've been trying to do in every one of these journal entries, not convince myself that everything happened for a reason, not convince myself that every ending is secretly a blessing. Sometimes something just hurts. Sometimes the future dies. Sometimes reality changes before your heart is ready. But I do think we get to choose whether our pain becomes an inheritance. Whether we quietly pass it down to every person who loves us after this moment, whether we ask our future to keep paying for our past or whether we absorb the loss, not because it's fair, but because we're trying to protect something bigger than ourselves. Our capacity to love again, our ability to meet the next chapter as the person this one shaped instead of the person this one imprisoned. So if you're listening to this while you're sitting inside of your own version of heartbreak, maybe don't ask yourself who owes you. Ask yourself something even harder. If no one is actually capable of restoring what you lost, who do you become when you stop trying to collect a debt on it? And what parts of your future are you still paying interest on a debt that belongs to your past? Let me know. We'll close the page here for now. Until next time.