I Will No Longer Break My Own Heart
Black Girl Burnout
Kelley Bonner
4.7 • 763 Ratings
🗓️ 15 April 2026
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this deeply reflective episode, Kelley introduces a life-changing mantra: “I will no longer break my own heart.” She explores how self-abandonment, internalized beliefs about suffering, and delayed joy have shaped her past—and how choosing softness and intentional joy became her path to healing. Through personal stories, including her time living in Europe and the creation of her “joy jar,” Kelley offers listeners a grounded, practical way to stop equating pain with worth and start building a life rooted in ease and self-respect.
Key Takeaways
- You were likely taught that suffering makes you worthy—but that belief is a lie you can release.
- Joy is not something you earn later; it’s the practice that improves your life right now.
- You don’t need permission or a special occasion to choose yourself—you already are the occasion.
Episode Highlights & Timestamps
- 00:00 — The mantra: “I will no longer break my own heart” and what it really means
- 02:00 — The UTI story: how self-neglect became a belief system about worth
- 07:00 — Living in Europe: learning to hold joy and pain at the same time
- 12:30 — The Joy Jar: a simple, tangible way to practice choosing joy
A Gentle Invitation
This week, choose one small way to stop breaking your own heart.
It doesn’t have to be dramatic. It might look like resting when you’re tired, buying something that brings you comfort, or creating your own version of a joy jar.
Let it be simple. Let it be yours.
Because the shift isn’t perfection—it’s direction.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Black Girl Burnout podcast, Kelly here. And today I want to start with a mantra. And that mantra is, I will no longer break my own heart. |
| 0:24.0 | I want to say that again, because I really think that there's something powerful about this sentence. |
| 0:30.4 | And it's a sentence we all need to hear, particularly as black women. |
| 0:34.7 | And it's not a concept. |
| 0:36.7 | It's a decision. I will no longer break my own heart. |
| 0:43.8 | And this episode is all about how I came to this mantra, how I came to this decision. And it's grounded in the facts that I realized the biggest |
| 0:57.6 | heartbreaks of my life didn't come from other people. They came from me. From the ways I internalize |
| 1:06.7 | what people did to me and how I allowed it to make a verdict about who I was as a person, |
| 1:14.1 | the ways I postponed good things, the ways I told myself that suffering was the price of being |
| 1:20.7 | worthy. That's what this episode is about. Not what the world does to you, and it does a lot, |
| 1:29.6 | but about what you've been doing to yourself and what it looks like to finally stop. |
| 1:37.4 | So to anchor into this episode, I'm going to tell you a little story about Kelly in her 20s and early 30s. |
| 1:43.9 | And it's a slightly embarrassing story, |
| 1:47.4 | but it's an important one because I think it really tells you about my state of mind. |
| 1:54.1 | And this is the thing. Back in the day, I used to get repeated UTIs at work, like all the time, because I would not stop to go to the bathroom. |
| 2:08.7 | As many of you may know, in a past life, I was a social worker, and I worked in community mental health, and I did trauma work. |
| 2:20.0 | I did a bunch of stuff, but one of the jobs that I had required me to drive around a rural upstate New York in just a car with a |
| 2:28.2 | blackberry, I'm dating myself, and a laptop. And I would conduct like mental health assessments and treatment out of people's homes. |
| 2:37.5 | The program had its challenges to say the least. But one of the things that I had convinced myself was |
| 2:45.8 | that this work was so important. I was helping some of the folks that had the biggest challenges were frequently hospitalized and some of them had severe PTSD. |
| 2:57.8 | And so I really was proud of the work I was doing. But it started to build this belief system in my mind that was telling me that the work was so important, I couldn't stop, that people |
| 3:11.3 | needed me so much that I couldn't take a break. |
... |
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