I Should Be Over It By Now

By Sashie Levertov - 09/29/2026

How many losses in our lives have we been trying to “get over” that we never actually allowed ourselves to grieve? 

For a long time, when I thought about grief, I only thought about death. Losing someone you love. The kind of loss that everyone recognizes and understands. But loss takes so many forms, and throughout a lifetime we experience losses that leave a real absence behind, even when we don’t necessarily recognize what we’re feeling as grief.

We grieve people, of course. But loss can also come through relationships, our health, the childhood we wish we had, the person we needed someone to be, a dream that didn’t materialize, or a version of ourselves that we don’t get to be anymore. Sometimes, we simply grieve the life we thought we would have.

And when we don’t recognize something as a loss, we may not give ourselves permission to feel the sadness that comes with it. It can be especially confusing because we may tell ourselves we shouldn’t feel it at all.

• I should be over this.
• Other people have it worse.
• I have so much to be grateful for.
• Why am I still sad about something that happened years ago?

I’ve learned that gratitude doesn’t erase grief. I can deeply appreciate what I have and still mourn something I’ve lost.

And sometimes, we aren’t able to grieve a loss when it happens. As a young woman in my twenties, and the mother of four small children, I was suddenly diagnosed with acute leukemia, an aggressive, life-threatening illness. So much changed in an instant, and there were losses that would continue to unfold in the months and years that followed. My health, my independence, the time I was forced to be away from my children, and parts of the future I had always assumed would be mine. But I didn’t experience those things as something to grieve at the time. I went straight into survival mode. My focus was on treatment, on getting better, and on doing everything I could to physically get through each day.

I didn’t have room for grief then. Staying hopeful and focused felt like the only part of my health I had any control over, and I was determined to get that one right. Whenever my mind went back to what I had lost, I pushed it away. There was simply no room for much beyond the immediate reality – surviving and getting home to my family.

Part of pushing it away came from fear. I was afraid that if I really let myself feel the sadness of what I had lost, I might not know how to come back from it. I had so little emotional space for anything beyond getting through the next day, the next treatment, the next thing in front of me. Opening the door to grief felt like opening something I wasn’t sure I would be able to close again.

I don’t look back and think I did that wrong. There are times when we do what we need to do to survive, and grief may simply have to wait until we have the space to feel it. The loss is still there, and when it surfaces months or even years later, it can be confusing to find ourselves still hurting over something that happened so long ago.

It can also take time to understand the full extent of what we’ve lost, especially when that loss includes the future we thought we would have. We all carry some vision of how our lives will unfold, with expectations about what will be and even, more or less, the order in which it will happen. For me, part of recovery became letting go of the way I thought things should be.

• I should be able to do this task by now.
• My body should be able to do that already.
• This shouldn’t be so hard for me.

There was the reality of my life, and there was the life I thought I was supposed to be living. There was grief in the difference between the two.

Simply recognizing that as loss began to change the way I understood what I was feeling. Instead of asking, Why can’t I just get over this? I could begin asking, What did this mean to me? What did I lose? What am I still needing to grieve?

There is something powerful about being able to recognize our grief for what it is. We can stop arguing with ourselves about whether we have a right to feel it and begin to understand what the sadness is connected to. There is so much healing in finding a safe place to do that. To name losses we may never have called losses and make room for feelings we may have spent years pushing away. Sometimes part of healing is being able to say, This mattered to me. I wanted this. I wish it had been different. And perhaps there is something to be gained by allowing ourselves to feel that sadness rather than being so afraid of it.

In The Wild Edge of Sorrow, psychotherapist Francis Weller writes about a “strange intimacy between grief and aliveness.” Those words capture something about grief that we can easily miss when we are so focused on getting through it or getting over it. Our grief comes from the same place in us that loves, hopes, dreams, attaches, and cares deeply. We feel sorrow because our lives matter to us. People matter to us. Our bodies matter to us. Our hopes for our children, our relationships, and our futures matter to us. Even the lives we imagined for ourselves matter.

There is a gift in being able to recognize that grief. It allows us to understand the depth of what we have felt and what we have lived. We don’t have to be so afraid of the sadness or so quick to push it away. We can give it a place, listen to what it is telling us about what matters, and allow ourselves to feel it. To grieve is to have cared enough for something to leave an imprint on us. To grieve is to let ourselves feel the beauty and richness of having loved, hoped, and wanted. Maybe “getting over it” is not the goal. 

When we allow ourselves to truly feel our grief, we allow ourselves to experience the fullness of what it means to be alive.