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198. What to Do When Life Feels Heavy, But You "Should Be Grateful"
Episode 19825th November 2025 • Journal Entries • Samantha Hawley | Inspired by Brene Brown, Glennon Doyle, Marie Forleo, Hillary Kerr, Mel Robbins
00:00:00 00:20:32

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Do you have A LOT going on right now? You keep telling yourself you’re fine — you should be fine — but something still feels heavy?

You’re doing the things, showing up for everyone, checking the boxes… but underneath, you’re tired in a way that gratitude doesn’t fix. Maybe you’ve been carrying stress that no one sees. Maybe there’s a grief you’ve been trying to outrun. Or maybe you’re just exhausted from pretending you’re okay because “other people have it worse.”

Here’s the truth: you can be grateful and still feel overwhelmed. Both can exist. And in this episode, I’m vulnerably sharing the heavy things happening in my life currently + the moment I finally stopped minimizing what I was feeling — and the 2 shifts that helped me breathe again.

You’ll understand:

  • Why naming hard things doesn’t make you ungrateful — it makes you honest
  • The question that softened my hardest weeks: “How can this be easy?”
  • How to stop carrying emotional weight that was never yours in the first place
  • The journaling question that helped me see what I was carrying that wasn't mine

After listening, you’ll feel permission to stop “should-ing” yourself into silence and finally honor what’s heavy without getting swallowed by it.

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