So you’re not over it.
The relationship. The layoff. The friendship that ended badly. The person you lost. The version of your life you thought you were going to have.
And now, on top of still hurting, you’ve started telling yourself that you’ve had enough time. You should be further along. You should be able to talk about it without getting that tightness in your chest. You should be done.
Let me stop you there.
There is no official date when a thing that mattered to you is supposed to stop mattering. Nobody set that deadline. And the people who seem to have met it usually just stopped mentioning it.
Nobody decided how long this was supposed to take
Most of us inherited a timeline without ever asking where it came from. There’s always some little rule floating around.
A breakup takes half the length of the relationship. The first year after a death is the hardest, so after that you should be better. You lost the job six months ago; surely you’ve moved on by now.
But who decided that? The length of the relationship doesn’t tell you how attached you were. A calendar year doesn’t tell you what the person meant to you. Two people can go through a loss that looks nearly identical from the outside and have completely different things to recover from.
There is no clock running somewhere that you failed to hear go off. The deadline was invented by people who were uncomfortable watching you still be in it, not by people who understood what you were carrying.
Context also changes the size of the hurt
Losing a relationship is one thing if you knew for months it was ending and another if you were blindsided on a Tuesday. Losing a job is one thing if you hated it and another if your whole identity was tied up in being good at it.
A friendship ending can hurt differently if that person knew every version of you since you were twelve. They knew the person you were before you figured out who you wanted to be. Losing them isn’t just losing a friend. It’s losing a witness.
Even when two events have the same name, breakup, grief, divorce, layoff, they can carry completely different amounts of history, shock, loneliness, and unfinished business. So asking how long should this take? without knowing all the rest of it is almost meaningless.
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Mine was a friendship
I should tell you where this is coming from, because advice like this should come from somewhere real.
Mine was a friendship. Not a casual one, either. We’d known each other for almost twenty years, and when it ended, it ended badly enough that I kept thinking there had to be one more conversation that would make the whole thing make sense.
There wasn’t. I tried. I drafted texts I didn’t send. I replayed the last real talk we had, looking for the sentence where I could have turned it. I never found it.
And what surprised me most was how long I kept carrying it. A year later, I could be completely fine, and then I’d see a thing I would have sent her, and I’d be stupidly sad all over again.
A restaurant we went to. A show she would have had an opinion about. A dumb joke that only she would have found as funny as I did.
I was embarrassed by that. I kept thinking, this was a friendship, not a death. Why am I still doing this?
But that was exactly the trap. I was using the label of the loss to decide how much grief I was allowed to have about it, instead of paying attention to how much that person had been woven into my life.
Twenty years of inside jokes. Knowing exactly what the other person would say before they said it. Having someone who remembered you before you were the version of yourself you are now. That’s not a small loss just because it has a smaller name than the other kinds of loss.
You don’t get to see how long it took everybody else
You see the breakup announcement. Then three months later you see them laughing at dinner.
You hear that somebody lost their job. Six months later they post about the new one.
You go to the funeral. Eventually they stop bringing the person up every time you talk.
What you don’t see is the night they cried in the car in the parking lot of the grocery store because a song came on. The week they were fine and then suddenly weren’t. The name they still type into their phone before remembering they can’t call anymore. The birthday that passed without the text that used to come every year at exactly midnight.
People don’t usually announce every time the sadness comes back. At some point they just stop narrating it publicly, and from the outside, that can look a lot like being over it. But silence isn’t the same as being done. They just stopped performing the grief where you could see it.
And here’s the part that matters: if you’re comparing your recovery to theirs, you’re comparing your inside to their outside. You’re holding your worst day against their best Instagram. That math will never come out in your favor, and it was never a fair equation to begin with.
“Over it” is probably the wrong finish line anyway
There are things I am absolutely better off from that I am still not completely over. They don’t control my day anymore. I don’t organize my life around the hurt. I can remember what happened without getting swallowed by it. I can talk about it without my voice changing.
But if I’m tired, or a song reminds me of that time, or a certain date rolls around, I can still register it in my chest. Not the way I used to, not the way it registered in the first year when it could rearrange an entire afternoon. More like a bruise that healed on the surface but still responds to pressure.
I don’t think that means I failed to heal. I think some experiences eventually become part of the life you’re carrying instead of a thing you successfully erase from it. And I think the people who insist they’re completely over everything that ever hurt them are either telling the truth about a different kind of loss or telling a different kind of story.
There is a difference, though, between giving yourself time and being completely stuck. If years have passed and the hurt is still keeping you from working, sleeping, connecting with people, or living much of a life at all, that deserves attention and probably support.
There’s no deadline shouldn’t become a reason to never look at what’s keeping you in the same place. But needing help moving through something is very different from being ashamed that you haven’t met an imaginary schedule.
I don’t know when you’re going to be over it. I don’t even know if over it is where you’re headed. What I do know is that you don’t need to add embarrassment to whatever you’re already carrying just because the calendar kept moving.
Time passing is not the same thing as a deadline passing. And somebody else getting quieter about their pain doesn’t mean they finished before you did.
Editor’s Note: “As Told to Bolde” stories are inspired by reader submissions, interviews, and accounts shared with our editorial team. Details are often changed, combined, or dramatized, and our editors use AI tools in the writing process. See our Editorial Policy.
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