The Other Shoe

In this episode, we explore a quieter side of anxiety that often shows up after grief and trauma. Not fear during chaos, but fear during peace. The strange reality that sometimes the hardest moments aren’t when life is falling apart, but when life finally starts becoming good again. 

In this episode of The Other Shoe, we explore the quieter, heavier side of grief: depression and acceptance. Not as clean endings or signs that someone is “over it,” but as the slow reality of learning to carry loss differently. A conversation about numbness, exhaustion, meaning, and the strange coexistence of sorrow and peace when life begins moving again after devastation.

In this episode of The Other Shoe, we explore the stages of grief beyond the textbook version: denial that keeps us functioning, anger that masks helplessness, bargaining that sounds like “if I had just…,” and the complicated reality that grief rarely moves in a straight line.A discussion about the ways loss reshapes us, how we survive what feels impossible, and why healing often looks messier and more human than people expect.

Losing a pet is a kind of grief that often gets minimized, even though it can unravel entire parts of your daily life, identity, and nervous system. In this episode of The Other Shoe, we reflect on the loss of Liam: the quiet routines, the caretaking, the anticipatory grief of watching someone you love decline, and the strange emptiness that follows after. A conversation about companionship, unconditional love, and the kind of grief that lives in the smallest corners of a home long after they’re gone.

On September 11, 2018, my stepdad called me.I didn’t answer. Not out of avoidance. Out of a life that was finally moving forward. He left a voicemail I assumed I had time to hear later.Seven days later, he was gone.This episode is about that unanswered call. About ordinary words that only become heavy in hindsight. About how silence stops feeling neutral after loss, and how the body learns to listen for what might disappear next.I talk about the vigilance that followed, the bucket list he wrote and framed, and what it’s like to watch plans outlive the person who made them. About how grief doesn’t always arrive as collapse, but as posture. As endurance mistaken for strength.This isn’t a redemption story.It’s about what happens when grief is organized instead of processed, and what it asks for when you finally stop running.

I didn’t process my grief.I organized it.After my father died, I learned how to keep moving. I went to school. I succeeded. I showed up. I learned how to function around loss instead of inside it, and I mistook that for resilience.This episode is about what happens when grief is compartmentalized instead of acknowledged. How it doesn’t disappear, but arrives sideways. In the body. In reactions that don’t match the moment. In a quiet tightening that no one else can see.This isn’t an episode about collapse or catharsis.It’s about grief that learned how to wait.And what it asks for, years later.

In this episode,  I talk about the first shoe, beginning with the day my father died when I was fifteen. I trace what that first loss taught my nervous system. This episode isn’t about dramatic grief or collapse. It’s about the quieter ways loss settles in. The way vigilance can masquerade as responsibility. The way joy can arrive with tension. The way the first shoe doesn’t just fall. It teaches you how to listen for the next one.

In this first episode of The Other Shoe, I talk about the space most of us live in after loss but before we understand it.The waiting.The holding of breath.The feeling that something has already changed, even if nothing has “officially” happened yet.This episode is an introduction, not just to this podcast, but to a way of naming grief that doesn’t always come from death alone. We talk about anxiety, anticipation, the nervous system, and what it means to live with the other shoe suspended overhead.If you’ve ever felt like you were bracing for impact, already tired from something that hasn’t fully arrived yet, this space is for you.