BW 207:
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Speaker: [00:00:00] If you've ever found yourself standing in front of the refrigerator asking yourself, "What do I want?" And realizing that the question isn't just about what's in the refrigerator, it's about what you want out of life, and you come up blank, then today's episode is for you. Welcome to episode 207 of The Brave Widow Show.
Hey, guys. We have some live events and things that are happening with Brave Widow, so if you wanna join me live, stay tuned to the end of the episode and I'm gonna share some upcoming dates that are happening in 2026. All right. Let's dive in. Today, I am not gonna tell you to chase after a big dream. I am not going to encourage you to come up with your life's purpose in today's episode.
Today, I am gonna help you relearn how to want things again. Now, if wanting things causes you to feel numb [00:01:00] or feels like a dangerous betrayal, then I want you to stay with me, 'cause we're gonna start very, very small
what I'm gonna be covering with you today, even though time-wise is not long, we're gonna go deep. And so I actually ended up creating a worksheet for you to help you unpack all of your own thoughts, your own objections, your own desires for what we're gonna be talking about today. So if you want access to that, check the show notes for the link, or if you're watching this on social media, you can comment or DM the word want, W-A-N-T, and I will send you directly the link to download the worksheet
Now, a lot of times in grief, we can avoid desire. We can even avoid wanting to want things again, if you will, right? And grief can suppress or flatten that desire because we can have thoughts [00:02:00] like if I don't want something again in the future, then I won't be able to be disappointed again. I won't have gone through all the effort of coming up with these hopes and dreams and plans only for them to be shattered, because I've seen how they could be shattered."
We also might feel a little bit of a loyalty conflict, so we feel like if we build a life that we love, then what does that say about the life that we lost? What does that say about our person? Sometimes I've had people say things to me like, "Oh, wow, just look at you, living your best life now," almost implying that I'm glad I'm in the position I'm in.
I'm glad that I am not living my old life anymore, said with that little undertone. Our brain can also tell us that if we stay neutral, if we don't want anything, we can't lose it, we can't be disappointed, we can't have our [00:03:00] expectations let us down, that if we, as long as we stay neutral, then we're just gonna keep floating through life.
But I just wanna ask you or invite you to take a second and think about when is the last time someone asked you, "What do you want?" When is the last time you asked yourself, "What do I want?" And then you freeze Being neutral, not wanting anything isn't peace. It's self-protection dressed up as I'm fine.
You might even think to yourself, "I don't want anything," because wanting things feels wrong when my person can't want anything anymore. And I don't want life without him, so therefore I just, I don't want anything And in the beginning, that is h- often how widows feel, and in the beginning, that makes complete sense.
And also, if we stay there, if we continue to have a life that we're just floating through, [00:04:00] we have no plans, no hopes, no expectations, no tiny little desire for anything, then our life often continues to feel very hollow, empty, shallow so when I'm working with widows, and we are working on desire and what you might want, and practicing wanting things again, yes, we practice that, is something that we build up over time. It's not something we flip the switch on and we have it all figured out and we know exactly what we wanna do.
But this is something we gently start in foundations, in the foundations program, but we really focus on a lot more in academy, is what do I want again? How do I wanna rebuild life? But today, don't worry, we're not gonna do six months of work in a one-hour podcast. We're gonna start very small. [00:05:00] Okay? So wanting things again, we can think of this as practice.
As we're getting in the reps, we're putting it in practice, we're testing things out, we're experimenting a little bit. Okay? And if wanting things feels very foreign, it feels very far away, I think you're gonna find this helpful. Let's start with just asking some simple questions. One might be, what do I want my coffee to be like this morning?
It might be, how do I want my morning to feel? It might be something like, what restaurant do I wanna go to tonight, or Friday, or whatever day you plan to go? But not thinking about these things as I'm just going through the motions, I'm just doing whatever has the least friction, whatever's the, the easiest thing to do, but really asking ourselves, like, what do I want?
Now, when we ask [00:06:00] what we want, a lot of times our brain naturally gives us resistance. Okay? And our brain can cause us a lot of anguish, because it might say things like, "I don't know. I don't know what I want in life anymore. I don't know. I don't know anything about anything I want at all." There's an amazing quote by Marcus Aurelius that says, "Don't disturb yourself by imagining your whole life at once." And so how I think about this is I don't wanna torment myself trying to have it all figured out, trying to know exactly what about this, and how's that gonna work, and where am I gonna live, and what am I gonna do for work and what about my relationship with my kids?
Like, there are so many things about life right now and life in the future that we don't have the answer to. And so as we're working through figuring out what I want more of, the question is not what do I want in life, what do I [00:07:00] want my life to be like? That's the overwhelming question that we answer in Academy.
You become much more clear in Academy what you want life to look like. But for today, in one hour, in under an hour, the question is not what do I want out of life, the question is what do I want more of in life? Maybe I want more gentleness. I want more kindness. I want more connection. I want more understanding.
I want more adventure. I want more exploration. Like, what is that word that describes these micro wants, these desires for what you want in your life right now? And keep in mind that how you answer that right now today isn't the way you're gonna continue to answer it the rest of your life. Because as you pull in more [00:08:00] of those things that you want in your life, then you'll...
You expand and grow, and you may want other things in life. You may prioritize other things you don't have to heal this desire to want things again by leaping into these big dreams or figuring out your life's purpose. You can heal that by choosing your coffee on purpose, by deciding what place to go eat tonight, this weekend, whenever, by asking what you want more of, what you want that one focus to be that you wanna pull more of in your life
So we can start by just looking at the next thing, like today, a moment today. What, what do I want that to look like? What do I want that experience to be? And then we can expand it to a place that feels more consistent, maybe a little more difficult, like weekends. So if you were to think right now what your weekends [00:09:00] currently feel like, if you were to list it, give it three words, three adjectives to describe your current weekends, what would those words be?
Currently how you feel about them right now. Are they lonely, isolating, empty, purposeless, confusing? Like, what three words would you use? Then let's think about if we were to desire, we were to want our weekends to look a little bit different, and if nothing had to be productive, nothing had to be impressive, what three words would you want to use instead?
I want my weekends to feel restorative, full of connection, exciting. Like, what three words would you want to use instead
So you can think about do you want your weekends to be at home alone versus around other people? Do you wanna be at home? Do you wanna be outside of your home? Do you want things [00:10:00] to do? Do you want quiet and downtime? Do you want a lot of stimulation and things to keep you busy? Like, instead of trying to solve for the entire weekend, let's start by just looking at 90 minutes, maybe even an hour.
Like, what do you want that 90-minute block to look like? And I'm gonna encourage you to press pause on this video, on this podcast episode, and really ask yourself that question. Like, what do you want more of in that consistent space, like a weekend? If you could choose 90 minutes to focus on creating more of that experience, what does that actually look like?
And the goal here is not that we have to build a whole new life over the weekend. It's not that we have to have every weekend figured out, but to have an intentional set of time, like, to protect 90 minutes of time that [00:11:00] feel like they're yours one thing that I really want you to hear clearly from me is your desire to want things again is not a betrayal of your person's memory. It's evidence that you are still alive. You did not die with your person you are not cheating on your past life by experimenting with your future. You're still alive. You're still human. Your story is not over yet
Now, one of the things we focus on a lot in Brave Widow, especially in the academy, is experimenting and being very curious. So in Foundations, we're focused more on stabilization, on healing, on creating calm out of the chaos, on getting our feet underneath us, and getting ready s- to come to the place where we wanna rebuild.
Versus academy, where we're actively rebuilding, we're experimenting, we're trying new [00:12:00] things, we're testing things out. And so one of the things that I teach there that I wanna share with you today is
we wanna differentiate trying and experimenting from being guaranteed an outcome, being promised an outcome. Okay? You are allowed to try something and then change your mind. So this might be I don't know what I want my weekends to look like. I don't know what I might want to do during my 90 minutes of time that I'm gonna experiment with.
Maybe I wanna go to a pottery class. Maybe I wanna stay home and read a fictional book. Maybe I want to go to a yoga class. Like, we're going to be willing to try things even when we're nervous, even when we're not sure, even though we may have lots of doubts, without being guaranteed or promised a particular outcome.
Maybe you try it and you hate it, and you don't ever do it again. Maybe you [00:13:00] try it, and you feel that spark of like, "Oh that was interesting. I wonder what happens if I try it again?" But being willing to try and experiment will bring you a different outcome than being in a place of staying frozen
So one thing that I wanna encourage you to do as you are trying to figure out what you want, what you might desire, how you can want again, and you're building up that potential to be able to want things again, is to, over this next month, write down one thing that you would be willing to try with no promise of an outcome.
Maybe it's going to a class, it's going to a meetup, it's trying something different in your routine, it's connecting with a friend you haven't talked to in a while, it's going somewhere and meeting a new friend. But just aim for one. Just try one thing
Because we can't [00:14:00] figure out what we might want, we can't practice wanting or desiring things again, we stay frozen. And I really wanna differentiate. There's a difference in being frozen, and staying numb, and going through life where we will just experience more of that, versus being earlier on in our grief journey and feeling like we're not, quote-unquote, doing things because everything feels really overwhelming and overstimulating what you're doing during that time isn't staying frozen. You're healing. You're resting. You're renewing strength. So those are active things, even if they don't feel active. So if you're earlier on in the grief journey, I don't want you to use this against yourself. Like, "Oh, Emily says I should want things again, and it's only been three months, and I just, I can't even...
I just wanna get through a day and not break down in tears five times for that day." [00:15:00] Okay? I don't want you to use this against yourself. But you, most people come to a place where life isn't overwhelming anymore, and they feel hollow and empty and like life is just passing them by. They don't know who they are anymore.
They certainly don't know what they want anymore. And so this is where we gently just start rebuilding that desire to want things, and unshackling ourselves from the, the grief, the guilt, the sense of betrayal that by wanting something in the future it means that we're abandoning the past. It's not true as we start to look at dreams again for the future, dreams can feel really messy, and it can feel like all of our dreams shattered or evaporated whenever our person died. So the way I think about it is we have old dreams. Maybe we had dreams before we met our person. Like, before I met [00:16:00] Nathan, I wanted to live on a farm and have horses and do all these things with horses and writing and have a big family, and I had one vision of what life would look like.
Then we have shared dreams or inherited dreams, dreams that we created together or dreams that we co-mingled with our person. And so that dream that I had before I met Nathan changed during our time together, and during the course of our 20 years of being together, those dreams adapted and changed over time.
And now we're looking at new dreams that are solo dreams again, new dreams potentially for the future. And so we can look at those and say, "Some of my dreams ended when my person died. Some of those things I don't want anymore." Some dreams might be on pause, and [00:17:00] some dreams are yours to rewrite To adjust and aim for again.
And if that feels really far away for you, that desire, that wanting to want might start with you giving yourself permission. And it might start with you just writing down, "I'm allowed to want..." whatever comes to mind
okay, so I know I gave you a lot. Even though it felt short, there's a lot of work that's packed in there. So I'm creating a worksheet specifically for this podcast episode specifically to help guide you through untangling and unraveling all of the thoughts, all of the shackles that you might have about your desire to want things again in the future, and how to identify one thing or one theme or one area of something that you could want [00:18:00] again.
So if you would like access to this worksheet, you can just comment or DM the word want, W-A-N-T, or if you're on YouTube or other channels, I'll put the link right in the show notes for how you can sign up for that.
You also can get access to the free community. And if you're wanting to join the wait list for the next academy that starts in January, or you're ready to join Foundations, all of that will be there and available to you, and help you decide which one may be right for you.
Okay, so now I just wanna share some information about upcoming live events and things that are happening here in the near future. So I'm gonna be in San Antonio, Texas around the middle of September, and there's no conference that I'm personally going to. My dad's going to a conference, and I am just his travel buddy and guide for a few days.
But I have a couple days that'll be free, so if we have anyone in the San Antonio, Texas area and you wanna meet [00:19:00] up, I would love to connect with you. Just shoot me an email and I would be happy to coordinate some time doing that. On October 8th and 9th, there is a conference called Held in Hope, which is hosted by Stand in the Gap Ministries. And Stand in the Gap Ministries empowers churches and ministry leaders in serving and supporting widows. They're an amazing organization and have partnered with so many different people across the world, it's crazy right here in Oklahoma.
This is our first ever widows conference. Tickets are only $25 and they have a discount code for you for their hotel room block. So I would love to see you there in person October 8th and 9th. I'll put the link in the show notes at standinthegap.org/
Held in Hope. And again, the show, the link will be there in the show notes lastly, I'm also going to be attending Dr. [00:20:00] Betsy, who's one of my amazing coaches. She is hosting a Faith and Growth Summit in Miami, Florida in December, and so I'm gonna put the link to that in the show notes as well, and I'll be telling you guys more about that as the day approaches. But if you would love to see me in person, if you'd love to meet up, these are gonna- there's some really great opportunities to be able to do that in person, and I would love to meet you
Speaker 13: Hey, thanks for spending this time with me today. If you're listening and thinking, "I don't wanna do this widow thing by myself," I'd love to invite you into the free Brave Widow community. It's a private, faith-based space where you can connect with other widows who really get it, join gentle live calls, and get resources to help you take the next small step forward.
To join us, just go to bravewidow.com/free or click the link in the show [00:21:00] notes. You don't have to walk this road alone. I'll see you inside
