In this episode, Lily unpacks the fear, “Will I just die alone”, that showed up dozens of times in her Instagram DMs, and walks you through what to actually do with it.

Inside this episode:

• Why this fear feels too shameful to say out loud, and why that shame is exactly the reason you need to say it
• The seesaw dynamic keeping you stuck between hope and hopelessness, and how to step off it for good
• What “dress rehearsing tragedy” is and why your brain does it to protect you
• The question to ask yourself instead of “will I die alone?” that gives your brain somewhere useful to go
• The 1am reframe that will help you actually release dating worry
  
  

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Show transcript:

Lily @ Date Brazen (00:00)

I’m so excited for this juicy episode all about the questions that you might be thinking in your brain that may feel too scary to say out loud. We’re gonna name them and we’re also going to work through them together. And at the end of this episode, I hope that you come out the other side more compassionate towards yourself, feeling more connected to yourself, feeling more curious about yourself.

and with a bunch of more tools in your pockets.

Okay, gorgeous friends, today we’re talking about a question that I, okay, the other day, let me back up. I put a poll in my Instagram stories and at day present, if you’re not following me, I’ve side note, I’ve heard from so many of you around the world in my DMS and I love it. I love hearing from you. Okay. But I digress. So I put this question in my stories and

It said, what question do you ask yourself in your brain about your dating life that you don’t say out loud? And I’m going to do a whole episode unpacking everything that I got in that because it was really powerful and honestly necessary stuff to talk about on this podcast. want to zero in on the answer that I got most often to that question. The answer was this, will I die alone? Am I just going to be somebody who doesn’t meet somebody?

And I got it like dozens of times. And I thought, okay, that means that we need to talk about it. We need to come to the table together and take a deep breath and look at this question and unpack it together. And so that’s the intention of this episode to really unpack this together, to not like toxic positivity our way out of it, to not say, but you’re not gonna die alone. Or I know for a fact that you’re gonna meet somebody.

because nobody knows what their future is gonna hold. I I learn that every day. I wanna know the answer to everything. I want to have all of the control. And the truth is that I really, really don’t and neither do you. And so let’s sit down. Let’s sit down here together, okay? So if you’re on a walk or you’re listening to this, like sitting down or wherever you are, I just want you to envision.

that we’re sitting at a round table together. You are here, I am here, and just the most supportive people that you can ever imagine are here too. And by the way, like these conversations are gonna be happening around the world as we listen to this, as we go through this episode together. Like we are at our table full of supportive fucking people and…

that were also joined by the thousands and thousands of people who are also joining us in this episode. So I want you to have this sense of connectedness, like envision this sense of connectedness to yourself, to the people at your table who are super supportive and the sense of connectedness to how unalone, not alone you are with the other listeners who are sitting at their own tables. I think that’s a really powerful image that

in this moment of asking this question, am I just gonna die alone? You are fiercely not alone. And so wanted to ground set with that first. Second, am I just gonna die alone? Okay, so this question, I think that the question that I asked of like, what are you asking your brain that you’re afraid to ask out loud is really interesting because questions that we don’t wanna ask out loud,

I’ll speak for myself. So when I am admitting something or saying, don’t say this out loud because I’m, the word in that sentence is usually ashamed to. I’m ashamed to admit to myself. I’m ashamed to say out loud. And why am I ashamed? ⁓

because maybe I think I shouldn’t be asking this question. Maybe I don’t think I should have this belief. Maybe I already do have the belief that I’m gonna die alone. And so I’m asking out loud, but I really, my brain has decided, why has your mouth not said those words out loud? And in your brain, what power are you giving that question, right?

And so first of all, I’d say that this is a sentence, it’s a string of words, it’s a thought. A thought is an emotional interpretation of the world around you. A thought is not a fact. And as the brilliant coach Carl Lowenthal says, a thought feels true if you’ve practiced it a bazillion times. And

Belief is tricky. It’s not like you can eject an old belief and inject a new belief. It doesn’t work like that. It is not a one, two, three, boom, done thing. It is a constant, longer than you want it to be journey to rewriting a neural pathway. in response to, let’s imagine that we’re at dinner, right? I’m gonna draw upon my experience of being single and talking to my friends about it and then talking to my single friends.

and now coaching, let’s say we’re sitting down at a restaurant, And we’re talking and you say something like, I’m afraid that I’m gonna die alone. My response is your friend, or the response that I got sometimes in response to that question was, no you’re not.

Perhaps the answer that I got a couple times is like a really supportive friend being like, no, you won’t. There are so many people out there, but you don’t know. You don’t know. Like it could be, it could happen. Oh, I’m sorry you feel that way, but like really like people meet somebody every day. Why don’t you just download another dating app? Or you know what? It happens when you least expect it. Or you know what? It happens. Okay. And I’ve probably been this friend before. And I think that that comes from your friend wanting the best for you.

your friend wanting you to have what you want, and also our collective, people’s collective discomfort with hard feelings. And maybe you have friends that hold space beautifully and they respond with, ⁓ that’s so hard to feel that way. I’m sorry you feel that way. And then you explore it together and unpack it together. Or maybe you have a great therapist that you do that with. And I would imagine that you have received feedback or in your brain, you give yourself feedback that feels like a seesaw.

I talk about the seesaw so much in this podcast and it’s a really helpful metaphor for me. This idea of I’m gonna die alone, no I won’t. I’m gonna die alone, no I won’t. It’s like this back and forth energy. And you know that feeling, I don’t know if you remember being on a seesaw, but remember that feeling of like your butt hitting the ground on the seesaw and the like thud of like, no, yes, no, yes.

And it gets kind of fun sometimes because you’re like, how far in the air can I fling myself if I push my feet down? And then the other person does that to you and you like thud down super hard. The same same with the come down of I’m gonna die alone. No, I won’t. Yes, I will. No, I won’t. Yes, I will. It can feel like a battle in your head. And I’m here to tell you that the answer is not in the seesaw. The answer is not in, no, let me just prove to yourself. Let me prove to myself that I’m not gonna die alone. The answer is in

stepping off the seesaw with first self-compassion. Self-compassion says, wow, thank you for sharing that with me. That’s a really hard thought. And I hear that it feels true. I’m sorry that that feels true. That’s a really hard place to be. I’m willing to feel anything to be with you. What else do you feel right now? Well, and this is like literally how I’ve trained myself to talk to myself in hard feeling moments.

I’m willing to feel anything to be with you. What are you feeling? I’m feeling shame. ⁓ that’s a hard feeling, shame. God, that sucks. it’s so uncomfortable. Are you willing to feel it now? Are you available to feel it? Yeah, I’m available to feel it. Okay, so let’s put our feet on the floor. Let’s take a couple deep breaths. Let’s put our hands somewhere self-compassionate.

feeling shame, it’s in the center of my chest and it feels like a crumpled ball of paper that is also like a black river of tar. Like I’m saying this all from personal experience of sitting down with that feeling that is beneath the question or thought, am I just gonna die alone or insert shame spiraling thought or question there. The answer to moving through this is to move through it.

to have your own back, say the thing that you’re afraid to say out loud and then have it be met with radical self-compassion. I think that it’s important to note that Brene Brown talks about and so many other thought leaders and experts of shame talk about this idea that shame breeds in silence. And so if you have this thought in your head, am I just gonna die alone and you haven’t said it out loud? Or,

if you’ve said it out loud a bunch of times that maybe it’s become like a joke, you know? And it’s something you say because you’re the only single friend at a party and you just wanna sublimate the discomfort of that by saying, I’m just gonna die alone. Like maybe you’ve said it a lot, but it doesn’t feel like you’ve been met with the compassion or slowness or softness that you need. Then the first step is like,

Shame can’t breed in silence, can’t grow in silence. And so say it out loud to yourself or to a friend, to your journal, to your therapist. Here’s my deepest fear here about my dating life. Okay, the second thing that I wanna go into, moving into the second thing, is why are you afraid that you’re gonna die alone? Once you feel, allow yourself to feel the feeling, allow yourself to be met with compassion and grace and like, yeah, that’s a normal thing to think and feel. That’s normal, it’s human. Why are you?

afraid that’s gonna happen. I’m going to put forward that perhaps you are dress rehearsing tragedy, okay, another Brene Brownism, which is in this case, sort of beating the universe to the punch and saying, I’m not gonna believe that it’s gonna happen or I’m gonna decide that it’s not possible or unlikely for me to meet somebody to prove, to like beat the universe to the punch so it doesn’t hurt as bad when I don’t.

I struggle with this in my business. Like when I create something I feel incredibly vulnerable. And my brain a lot of times goes into self-protection mode. And I think that that’s very normal and that’s when dress rehearsing tragedy happens. And that’s when it’s really important

to notice thought not fact, to feel your feelings, and to identify like why might it be uncomfortable to be right here right now? What is uncomfortable about this present moment being single? What do I need right now? That’s the third question I want you to ask yourself. What do I need right now? Because you don’t need a romantic relationship to be well right now. You need

yourself, you need to have your own back. You need belonging with yourself to move through this world fiercely and powerfully and with grace. Feeling the way you wanna feel in that romantic relationship, you probably in the right romantic relationship that you envision for yourself when and if you dare to give yourself permission to envision something more in your romantic life, you might be envisioning somebody who holds a

hold space for you, who shows up with you, who after a hard day sits down and says, let me cook for you or let me, how was your day? Tell me about it. that’s so hard. I’m sorry. You probably are imagining this like incredible human being who’s just holding you in such softness and grace and care. And I believe that manifesting this person into your life means giving yourself the energy that you want to receive.

It means meeting yourself in that energetic plane. I’m saying words here that I don’t fully, I’m not a manifestation expert, both and I do think that I’m really good at manifesting. And I think that my clients become really good at manifesting when they start to give themselves the energy that they want to receive in the right relationship, in the right job, in the right friendship, in the right relationship with their mother. It’s those, what do you want to receive?

How can you fiercely give that to yourself right now? So asking yourself, what do I need? How can I give it to myself in this moment? knowing that sometimes the answer is, I can’t receive that right now, what I want. Maybe what I want is to have sex with another person that I’m deeply in love with and that I don’t, maybe masturbation doesn’t feel like as fulfilling in the moment and you wanna have sex with somebody else. Yeah, and I don’t have that and that’s hard.

Maybe you want somebody to cook for you and you don’t have the money for takeout. So you have to cook for yourself. That’s hard. Maybe you want to buy a house with a partner and or have a family with a partner and you want to have a family starting now and the partner’s not here right now. And that’s hard. This is not this process of investigating the deeper will I just die alone.

and then feeling your feelings and then meeting yourself with compassion and then ⁓ recognizing thought and effect and then ask yourself, do I need? Sometimes the answer is not all of my needs are met right now, full stop always, or maybe the answer is not all of my desires are met right now. So then we get into the difficulty of I want something and it’s not here yet, God damn it. So what do we do in that space between?

What do we do in the space between I want something and it’s not here yet? I think the answer, I know the answer, is slowing down. The answer is belonging. The answer is bringing in belonging with yourself and with people that you trust to hold you in that compassion. The answer is doing a self-compassion meditation to normalize your experience. You’re not alone. It’s normal to feel this way.

Suffering is a normal part of life that really sucks. Life is not all like really great or really terrible. It’s like 50-50. Will you die alone? I don’t know. I don’t think that that question is very kind to yourself. Will I die alone has so much weight with like, will I die alone? Weight of like, what does that mean about me if I’m a single woman who dies alone?

What if you create an incredible romantic partnership and then 15 years later decide that it’s not the best thing for you? What if you have a romantic partnership and then like something tragic happens? Or what if you, there’s so many things that we’re out of control of in this world and the question, am I going to die alone? I think is fundamentally negating the magic and the unknown and the awesome that is in store for you. And

If you were like, I’m gonna find the love of my life and we’re gonna be together forever and it’s gonna be amazing full stop all the time with them. And I know for a fact that I’m gonna meet the right person in the next year. That would also be a little bit ⁓ like negated. That’d be too much on the like all good side. Like it’s not all good, all bad. It’s somewhere in the middle. So how can you…

change, shift your perspective. Like we’re standing here, we’re sitting here at the table, what if you like shifted a little bit to the right and looked at that question through a neutral lens, try it, try it with me. Will I die alone? How can we neutralize that question? What if we were to say, am I going to find the right romantic partnership? Am I going to be fulfilled in romantic partnership? Am I gonna meet somebody who I’m interested in?

Do those feel a little more neutral to you than will I die alone? Because the will I die alone carries with it a lot of stuff that you get to unpack in your journal and with your therapist and with me. Here we are together. So I just wanted to help you in this process to like bring along a couple of tools, right? We talked about the tool of self-compassion. We talked about the tool of shifting your perspective a little bit to neutralize the question to be a more.

a more generous, high quality question for you. We talked about the slowing down, the stepping off of the seesaw of it all. All of these pieces are going to help you move through those hard moments when you’re at 1 a.m. and freaking out. The other 1 a.m. piece of advice that I have, the last thing I’ll leave you with, which has really helped me in the last year, and I got this from my incredible coach, Simone Sol.

When my brain is spinning at 1 a.m. with my worries and my doubts and my dress rehearsing tragedy because it happens because I’m human. Y’all, sometimes my anxiety spiraling is truly rivaling that of the Deja Vu roller coaster at Six Flags Atlanta. And if you know, know. That roller coaster shuts down all the time. I don’t even know if it exists anymore, but when I went.

long time ago, it would like shut down in the middle of people being on it and then it would start up again and it would go backwards and forwards and all these things. So my anxiety is very real sometimes. The only thing that puts me to sleep sometimes when I’m in an anxiety spiral worrying about my own version of am I going to die alone or is this going to be okay? Because also, and I know that I’m on a tangent now and I hope you’ll come with me because it’s fun over here. Okay.

Y’all, the question, will I die alone? Also, sometimes when I’m coaching on this question, it ends up being about, I going to die? Or like, am I gonna die alone in the forest from exposure because our brains fear rejection like it fears death. And so this fear of, am I going to die? Is just very natural and normal. And it’s also this fear of like, if I’m not in control of what I want, then what do I do about what I want?

That’s a very valid question. And I think for me, the answer is, you know, again, going back to the self compassion, going to the what can I do for myself right now? What do I need? How can I give myself that energy? The 1 a.m. advice that I have is this, there’s nothing to fix. There’s nothing to fix. There is nothing to fix. I’m not trying to fix you. At 1 a.m. when I’m like,

shit, I’m close, it’s not gonna work out. Hey, Lily, I hear your worries and I’m not trying to fix any of this. Like, just a gentle tone, not the like, I’m not trying to fix this right now. Just like, there’s nothing to fix. This is not broken. There’s nothing wrong. And then when I say that to myself, when I say it from that grounded, like adult Lily place, my brain immediately calms down. like,

We’re not trying to fix anything. Okay, let me go to bed. I need sleep. So acknowledging that we’re not gonna, there’s nothing to fix. Your brain is a brain. There is only growth. Growth isn’t necessarily fixing anything. It’s growing. Like you not knowing how to drive a car was, and then you learning the skill of driving a car was not you fixing not knowing how to drive a car.

There was nothing broken with you not knowing how to drive a car. You just learned a new skill and grew. Same, same with the thoughts in your brain, especially these thoughts that you’re afraid to say out loud. Am I gonna die alone? There’s nothing to fix. Your brain is doing a brain thing. So take a deep breath and acknowledge that there’s more growth to happen here. There’s new skills to learn. There’s a new awareness to bring.

There is nothing to fix, because you are not broken. Your brain is a human brain doing its thing to protect you. And she’s done, he’s done, they’ve done an amazing job thus far. It’s just time to learn some new skills. So I’m so grateful that you’re here with me. I’m grateful that we’re here together. I hope that this resonated with you. And if it did, then please

leave a review, especially on Apple podcasts. I love reading them, they mean so much. And I can’t wait to support you again next week Love y’all, bye.