You Cannot Optimize Your Way Out of Grief
Black Girl Burnout
Kelley Bonner
4.7 • 762 Ratings
🗓️ 27 May 2026
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sometimes grief doesn’t look like falling apart — sometimes it looks like becoming incredibly productive. In this episode, Kelley reflects on the realization that she had been producing healing instead of actually experiencing it, and how years of survival mode, caregiving, medical trauma, and loss shaped her relationship to grief. Through personal storytelling and thoughtful reflection, she explores how Black women are often culturally rewarded for over-functioning while quietly disconnecting from themselves emotionally.
This conversation is an invitation to recognize the difference between narrating healing and truly inhabiting it. Kelley also introduces the idea of “the thaw” — the slow process of returning to yourself after prolonged survival mode — and shares why softness, embodiment, and emotional honesty matter now more than ever.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Grief doesn’t always look emotional — sometimes it looks like productivity, over-functioning, and survival mode.
- Many Black women are taught to intellectualize pain and keep moving instead of fully feeling and processing loss.
- Healing may begin not with becoming “better,” but with becoming reachable to yourself again.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS & TIMESTAMPS
00:01:00 — When Productivity Becomes a Mask for Grief
Kelley explores the realization that she had been “producing healing” instead of fully experiencing it and reflects on the pressure to turn pain into purpose too quickly.
00:05:00 — The Three Books That Cracked Everything Open
A conversation about art, grief, emotional release, and the moment Kelley realized how long it had been since she truly allowed herself to feel.
00:11:20 — Survival Mode, Trauma, and the Black Woman Freeze Response
Kelley shares the cascade of events from the last several years — illness, caregiving, business instability, and loss — and how prolonged survival mode can disconnect us from ourselves emotionally.
00:19:00 — What “The Thaw” Looks Like
Kelley introduces the beginning of her thawing process: slowing down, reconnecting to her body, and learning how to return to herself gently after years of bracing for impact.
A GENTLE INVITATION
Take a moment this week to ask yourself:
Where have I been over-functioning instead of truly feeling?
Maybe your nervous system has been protecting you. Maybe the numbness isn’t failure — maybe it’s survival. Give yourself permission to slow down long enough to notice what your body, heart, or spirit might be trying to say.
And if this episode resonated with you, share it with another Black woman who may need the reminder that healing doesn’t have to be optimized to be real.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to a Black Girl Burnout podcast. |
| 0:12.1 | Kelly here. |
| 0:13.1 | And today I want to talk about grief. |
| 0:17.1 | This episode is for you if you have been feeling loss in some way. |
| 0:24.5 | And I'm not going to put a boundary on that because I think so many of us are experiencing so many types of loss. |
| 0:34.6 | And so if that phrase resonates with you, this episode is for you. I'm going to give a snapshot |
| 0:43.0 | of where I've been these days, how I'm doing, and create an invitation and some space for us |
| 0:51.1 | to talk about grief and loss and what that looks like and how I'm experiencing |
| 0:57.7 | it in my life right now. And the goal here is to hopefully help you find permission to explore |
| 1:07.2 | grief and loss within yourself and give you some tools to help guide you so that you |
| 1:14.0 | are feeling and healing at the same time. The truth is, sometimes grief doesn't look like |
| 1:22.7 | falling apart. It looks like being incredibly productive or answering those emails even when your nervous |
| 1:31.0 | system is collapsing. It looks like caregiving and producing and building and performing |
| 1:37.8 | even while you feel yourself disappearing in your own life. Recently, I realized something that cracked me open. |
| 1:47.7 | And that was the fact that I think I had been producing healing instead of actually |
| 1:54.7 | experiencing it. |
| 1:56.8 | Now, let me explain what I mean by that. |
| 2:00.0 | I felt like so much of how I operate in the world is to create |
| 2:06.6 | and to generate. And so much of how I live my life is to talk about and so much about how I do |
| 2:16.0 | this podcast surrounds me talking about what I'm experiencing |
| 2:20.6 | and how I translate my experiences into kind of like this universal truth that hopefully you can |
| 2:28.2 | relate to. And it occurred to me that there were some hidden consequences I didn't think about. |
... |
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