Topic: Grief and Trauma Awareness — Key Scriptures: Psalm 139:1-6
There is a phrase that functions almost like a reflex in most of our lives.
“I’m fine.”
We say it without thinking. To coworkers, to family members, to the person who asks how we are in passing. We say it in church lobbies and ministry meetings and on the phone with people who love us. We say it so many times, so automatically, that sometimes we lose track of whether it is actually true.
For some people, the performance of okayness is so practiced, so deeply embedded in how they move through the world, that they would not know how to stop doing it even if they wanted to. The not-so-okayness has been managed for so long that it has almost become invisible — even to them.
But the soul keeps a different kind of record.
The soul does not stop keeping score just because we have stopped paying attention to it.
The cost of chronic okayness is rarely discussed, because the people paying it are also the people who are best at appearing fine. They are the ones who show up, who meet expectations, who hold things together for everyone around them. From the outside, they look like people who have it together. From the inside, they know that something has been slowly draining for a very long time.
After 24 years in pastoral ministry — years of being the person others brought their hardest things to, years of being on call for crises that did not belong to me, years of pouring out in ways that felt meaningful and right and true — I learned this from the inside. I learned what it costs to perform okayness for long enough. I learned what it is like to look around one day and realize that the version of yourself that used to be there — the one with lightness and joy and genuine ease — had quietly slipped away while you were busy being fine.
When my mother was dying of cancer, I remember the particular exhaustion of grieving while continuing to function. Of carrying an enormous private weight while maintaining the external presentation of a person who was managing. Of looking for someone to simply be with me in it — not to fix it, not to explain it, just to acknowledge the weight of it — and finding mostly silence.
That experience taught me something I had counseled others about for years but had never fully understood from the inside: the absence of permission to not be okay is its own kind of suffering.
When no one asks how you are — really asks — you learn to stop asking yourself.
At BRKN Soul Care, one of the most consistent things that happens in a first session is a kind of quiet exhale. People arrive having rehearsed what they are going to say. Having prepared the managed version — the version that is honest but not too much, real but not overwhelming, hurting but still functional.
And then someone asks them how they actually are. And waits. And the rehearsed version falls away.
What comes out instead is what has needed to come out for a long time. The grief that has not had space. The exhaustion that goes deeper than sleep can fix. The anger, the fear, the questions, the loss — things that have been carefully managed and quietly carried and never given actual room to be what they are.
This is not dramatic. It does not look like falling apart. It looks like a person finally being honest, sometimes for the first time in a very long time, about what it actually feels like to be them.
And that honesty — that simple, vulnerable, not-at-all-small act of saying the true thing in a space where it is safe to say it — is where healing begins. Not at the resolution. Not at the insight or the breakthrough or the reframe. At the permission.
You are allowed to not be okay.
You are allowed to bring the unmanaged version of your inner life into a space that can hold it. You are allowed to be grieving and exhausted and uncertain and angry and afraid — all at once, without apology, without a timeline for when it should be over.
BRKN Soul Care exists to be that space. Not a space that rushes past the not-so-okayness toward the next thing. A space that treats the not-so-okayness itself as the place worth sitting in — because that is where the real work happens, and because you deserve someone willing to sit there with you.
You have been okay for long enough.
You are welcome to not be, here.
If this resonates with where you are today, BRKN Soul Care is here. Book a free Introductory Conversation at brknsoulcare.org and take the first step. You don’t have to carry this alone.