264: Better, But Not Okay with Tracy Dobmeier and Wendy Katzman

Chelsea sits down with authors Tracy Dobmeier and Wendy Katzman to explore their novel Ten Thousand Light Years from Okay and what it means to be “better but not okay”—that space where life is moving forward, but your heart still carries the weight of grief, heartbreak, or uncertainty. We dive into unexpected heartbreak and how to move forward fearlessly when grief has robbed you of your invincibility. We also explore the gap between progress and pain, the individual path of healing, and the sustaining power of friendship in carrying you through grief. Whether you’re navigating heartbreak, a life shift, or just the overwhelm of being human, this episode reminds you that it’s okay to not be okay—and that feeling this way is part of breaking upward.

Tracy Dobmeier and Wendy Katzman:

Website: https://www.dobmeierkatzman.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/katzndobs

Amazon: Ten Thousand Light Years from Okay

Chelsea Leigh Trescott:

Email: chelsea@breakupward.com

Instagram: https://instagram.com/thankyouheartbreak

Advice Column: https://www.huffpost.com

Writing: https://thoughtcatalog.com/chelsea-leigh-trescott

Transcript

Speaker: 0:01

This is Thank You Heartbreak.

Chelsea Leigh Trescott: 0:04

Hi everyone, I'm Chelsea Leigh Trescott.

Speaker: 0:08

As a breakout coach for relationship advice columnist and the founder of Breakup Word, Kelsey is passionate about human beings and their stories.

Chelsea Leigh Trescott: 0:17

This podcast shines a light on Heartbreak, showing you that the most crushing experiences are also your greatest opportunity to become meaningful, relatable human beings. Now, let's get to the heart of it. There are some conversations that don't start with answers. They start with that quiet moment where you realize I'm not okay, but I'm also not broken. Today's episode, episode 264, lives in that space. To skip this intro and go right into the episode, go to the five minute and 45-second mark. Otherwise, stay with me. I'm sitting down with authors Tracy Dobmeyer and Wendy Katzman, two best friends that just released the fiction book 10,000 Light Years from OK, a book that doesn't try to rush healing or wrap pain up in a bow, and names what so many of us feel after heartbreak, loss, or life cracking us open, that the distance between where we are and where we think we're supposed to be can feel astronomical. 10,000 Light Years from OK isn't about despair, it's about honesty. It's about acknowledging that sometimes you're far from okay, and that pretending otherwise only widens the gap between you and yourself. This book is a companion for the in-between, for the days when you're functioning but not fully living yet, where grief hasn't disappeared, but meaning is beginning to flicker back on. In this conversation, we talk about heartbreak, friendship, creation, coincidence, and what carries us when romantic love falls away. We talk about the healing power of being witnessed, the quiet ways people show up for us, and how art and friendship can hold us when we don't yet know how to hold ourselves. This isn't a conversation about fixing your life. It's a conversation about staying with your life. If you've ever felt like you were doing fine on the outside while quietly unraveling on the inside, if you've ever wondered whether being far from okay might actually be part of the journey back to yourself, this episode is for you. Now before we go into episode 264, I want to touch upon what was really striking about this conversation and also leave you with a little mini coaching exercise that may support you as you are listening to this episode. What moved me most is how much the story between the authors, between Tracy and Wendy, my guests, was a story about friendship as a lifeline, not as a consolation prize, not as something secondary to romantic love, but as a force that can carry us through loss, confusion, in the long middle spaces where nothing is resolved yet, but everything is changing. So often after heartbreak, we think the question is, how do I move on? When the real question is, who walks with me while I'm becoming someone new? I'm gonna say that again. We often think the question that is going to deliver us to the next stage of our life is how do I move on? But the real question is, who walks with me while I'm becoming someone new? This conversation isn't about bypassing pain. It's about honoring the distance you've traveled, even when you don't feel there yet. It's about the people who sit on the floor with you while you're not okay and don't try to fix you. It's about creation, coincidence, and the courage it takes to stay open when it would be easier to shut down. Before we begin, I want to offer you a break upward exercise to hold as you listen. Take a quiet moment now and ask yourself, who has carried me through something they didn't cause? Who has carried me through something they didn't cause? Not who tried to solve it, not who rushed me forward, but who stayed. And then asked how might my healing look different if I let that kind of support matter just as much as romantic love once did. Sometimes breaking upward isn't about getting back to okay. It's about realizing you were never meant to do the distance alone. Thank you as always for being here and letting me support you through everything you were in. Now, episode 264 with Tracy and Wendy. I feel like I should begin by thanking you guys because I have sworn off fiction in my life. You don't read novels, I don't watch sitcoms, I need nonfiction all the time. So this was a little risk I took and I couldn't put it down. I was hooked. I really was. It was a fun departure without feeling like such a departure because I think it's such a relevant experience. Grief, heartbreak, feeling like we don't know how to get our creative powers back and coincidence, all of it. So thank you for this. Thank you. Wonderful. Thank you. We're thrilled. So where should we begin? Would you guys like to explain what the book is about? Because I want to make sure that I don't give anything away, but I want you guys to be able to tell the listeners the book that we are speaking about. Great. Terrific.

Tracy Dobmeier : 6:38

Yes. So I can give you a quick summary of the book. It's called Ten Thousand Light Years from Okay. And several years after her husband's shocking death mirrored a plot line in her debut novel, a superstitious writer is on the verge of squandering her career when a bedtime tale that she spins for her young daughter convinces her to write a hopeful romance. But when a man bearing an uncanny resemblance to the novel's love interest suddenly walks into her life, she has to learn the difference between imagining happiness and fighting for it before it costs her everything.

Wendy Katzman: 7:11

The novel dives into questions of connection, coincidence, resilience, and really what it means to find your way when the world feels overwhelming.

Chelsea Leigh Trescott: 7:23

Finding your way when the world feels overwhelming. Also, the book is so much about this first love interest, her first real love. And it was a love that seemed like even her mom recognized as being special, something that her own mom never had with her father. That because it was cut short by a freak accident. I kind of want to start by speaking to a romance that ends unexpectedly, a romance that ends when we don't want it to end. So how we are grieving love when we don't want to let that love go, and we feel like it's even cruel to ignore the love that we had, especially when we have children in our life who we want to keep that memory and that positive information alive for the child. So, what would you say about those that who are grieving a love that was real, honest, and ended in a way that was outside of their control?

Tracy Dobmeier : 8:25

Definitely, you've totally nailed exactly what we were trying to get to in this book. I think that when love ends unexpectedly and in a very, you know, kind of tragic way, the grief journey that a person goes on is very kind of individual. Everyone has their own way of coping. And we see that in our book where we really tried to sort of show that the main character, Thea, and her former in-laws, once her husband dies, that she maintains a very close relationship with them. And they're all struggling in their own way. But she's struggling obviously the most because she's lost her husband and she's also newly pregnant when this happens. And so she feels this tug and pull, I think, to kind of she's very young, like people are telling her, move on. You just you have so much life ahead of you. But she also has this baby that's about to come and then grows, you know, over the course of the book. She grows up a little bit. And it's a very important thing to her to keep her husband's memory super alive and very real, I think, to her daughter. So she feels like she's actually kind of has a dad still. But it also makes it harder for her to let go of her grief and of her heartbreak and figure out how to move on into, you know, a future that doesn't have her husband anymore.

Chelsea Leigh Trescott: 9:51

One thing I heard you say within that is we all have our own journey. And her journey was very individual. And so often the people around us will give us guidance and advice from their position. So, how do we honor our unique journey? And instead of rushing, for example, to get it back out there just because our best friend tells us to, and that we need to, like, in the book, you know, go date the hot ER doctor, and yet we don't feel ready to. What would you guys say, maybe even from your own experience? When did you know that it was time to explore again? Time to let new experiences into your heart. Or, you know, how do you prioritize your own guidance versus other people's, people pleasing, really?

Wendy Katzman: 10:51

It's hard. Like you want to please people around you, but as we were trying to show in the book, everybody's grief journey is different. And this idea that there's a set amount of time or a way to do grief. Um, I mean, we don't think that exists. I think it's really you have to honor what each person is gonna go through. And I think that was what one thing that was particularly sad for Thea for me and for us is that maybe if people in her life had honored her journey, she wouldn't have been quite as alone in her grief. Because I think it's helpful sometimes to know that other people are experiencing these things. Know that you're not the only one, and that that makes it a little bit easier to share it.

Chelsea Leigh Trescott: 11:44

One of the large pushes that was coming at her, and maybe it's very relevant for people today and and women today, is oh my God, look at your career. Look at the money you're being offered for a book advance. Why don't you focus on financial gain over being kind of stuck, is the wrong word, but stuck in your grief. You know, why don't you focus on a career? And though I think that's powerful, and especially with what you guys chose to have her career be, you know, it was writing, which is a form of creation. And I've really thought about how the cure to anxiety, I think maybe the cure to grief is creation, creating. So I think that was a wise choice. It didn't feel so empty, but I think that not everyone is a writer, right? So for them, it might be that like, oh, just get back out there and and work on climbing some ladder, some corporate ladder to give yourself definition and success and dopamine. What do you guys think about that? Blindly choosing to go after a career in the midst of your grief.

Tracy Dobmeier : 12:57

I think it bites you in the backside eventually, if you because I think it ends up being something where you put off your grief and you compartmentalize it and you don't actually deal with it. I think it's a very real thing. Distraction is not the same as processing grief. And only the person in the grief situation knows whether they're kind of attacking, you know, what they need to be doing on their own schedule. Um, but I think that listening to people who are sort of always like, you know, just go do this, go do that, keep yourself busy, let's go out, let's do, you know, I think that is, you know, it might get you out of a moment or two where you're kind of feeling sad and kind of put you in a situation where you had it's not a not a terrible thing to have friends who are pushing you to kind of engage with the world because the world is beautiful. And you know, and sometimes that is like a a way to um get yourself to healing. But I think in that situation, you just really have to trust yourself. You have to trust what you need, honor what you need, and just really ask yourself, what is helping me kind of like cope? And I mean, the best thing I can think of from my just from like a personal example, my mom passed away when I was pregnant with my first son. And it was just awful. It was, you know, trying to like imagine raising my first child and my this grandchild that my mom never got to meet, you know, without any help from my mom. And I was actually fortunate I had absolutely incredible mother-in-law who stepped in and really helped me and taught me and, you know, and got me kind of like off the ground and everything. I had a robust career at the time. And I had to actually step away eventually from my career once my second child was born, because I just I really did feel like I needed to tend to myself. And part of tending to myself was not working, you know, long weeks and it was being with my children, being present. And that was, you know, there's absolutely no like, I don't make any judgments. I think working is great. Working women are, I mean, we've our friendship was kind of built on talking about these issues and how like women just need to support everyone's individual choices because they're all valid and you know, and special. But for me, that was like I needed to come back to myself, and that was how I actually got through my grief. It took longer than I expected because I had a lot of distractions. So I think I was able to really just be present. And I wanted to say one more thing about the creativity point that you talked about. So we are writers now, but we were not writers. You know, we we started writing at the age of like 48. We were in our late 40s when we started this project, and neither of us have had any creative writing experience at all. And I think, I mean, so Thea was a writer, so she has that ability to kind of go into that creative world to help deal with her emotions, and we've used that as well. But there are many types of creativity, right? I mean, we didn't think of ourselves as creative, we thought we were like the opposite of creative. But what we've realized is that everyone's creative. Like you just have to be creative in how you think about whether you're creative.

Wendy Katzman: 16:17

To build on that, the whole reason we started writing was as a way of coping with some grief situation that we were each dealing with. Each of our husbands had had life-threatening health issues. Oh, wow.

Chelsea Leigh Trescott: 16:33

And they're both not gonna be both survivors. Yeah.

Wendy Katzman: 16:39

But we had been friends forever, and we'd had business ideas and book ideas, and and finally we had this idea. We were gonna write maybe a book about friendship. In the face of crisis. In the face of crisis, and it was gonna be nonfiction because Tracy had been a lawyer and I had been in marketing, and we didn't know anything about writing fiction. And one day she said to me, Well, what if we just made the whole thing up and we wrote fiction? So we Googled how do you write a novel and we taught ourselves how to write and how to said our first book, Girls with Bright Futures, came out of that whole experience of trying to process what was happening to our families and to our friendships. Both of our older kids were in like kind of going through college admissions, which can feel like life and death. And so the juxtaposition of college admissions, it was for me.

Chelsea Leigh Trescott: 17:34

When I didn't get into the school I wanted, I was threatening suicide. So yeah.

Wendy Katzman: 17:40

Yeah. Yeah. We've been through it four times, you know. But then when you're facing actual life and death situations, it was an interesting juxtaposition, being creative and learning this new skill, but also using it as a way to really understand and explore all the feelings that we were having. It was an incredible way to process what happened to us and helped us move forward and through our lives.

Chelsea Leigh Trescott: 18:06

Let me ask you then friendship is such a special bond. And I remember as I was getting older hearing people say that it almost was more vulnerable to form friendships than it was to date. So you guys have really been able to be there for each other and find familiarity in both of your husbands experiencing something quite scary. What did you guys offer each other to help support each other during that time? What worked really well? Because often in the midst of grief, relationships can kind of fall apart because someone didn't know how to be there or someone in the quote unquote right way. What did you guys do that was kind of right for each other? Tell me.

Tracy Dobmeier : 18:52

So my husband had a form of cancer. It's been treated and he's good, but when he was in treatment and it was terrifying, my kids were 12 and nine, and we had a big family event coming up. And I wanted to cancel it because I just couldn't imagine trying to put on this big event that was meaningful to our family and very, you know, important to our extended families and everything. But it was just um something that we I I couldn't, I was falling apart essentially. And Wendy said, I'm gonna plan that for you.

Chelsea Leigh Trescott: 19:28

And I can see it.

Tracy Dobmeier : 19:30

I love it. She showed up in like such an incredibly like important real way. She was like, I got this. Like she she made timelines, she like, you know, met with the venue, she like she helped plan the menus. I mean, I just kind of like approved stuff. And and it turned out to be so wonderful and such a life giving, you know, moment that we experienced. And like, I'll just never forget that. That was so amazing.

Wendy Katzman: 20:00

Husband had a heart attack at a very young age and it was terrifying. And like our lives had to change because of it. And she and her husband came over and she came with cookbooks and sat and just like they were both just there. They just showed up and said, Okay, this is gonna be your new reality, and here's what you're gonna do. And then they were there with us. I thought you my salad dressing. Yeah, exactly. We were just never alone. And like it was such a gift.

Chelsea Leigh Trescott: 20:36

Yeah, I feel that. I feel that.

Wendy Katzman: 20:39

And we have another one.

Tracy Dobmeier : 20:40

We do have another one. A lot of heartbreak, not in the romantic sense, but a lot of heartbreak in our our lives. Yeah. Well, I guess it's your story. You know, so we'd just gone through this crazy thing with our husbands, and we wrote our first manuscript, and we literally like it was like the day that we finished our first manuscript, and we were starting to think about querying agents. And I went through a routine mammogram and got slapped with a breast cancer diagnosis. And so all of a sudden, we were like, you know, we were had been so hopeful, we were so excited, there was great stuff happening, and now I had to like retrench, you know, and I had to go through a full year of treatment and it was really ugly. And Wendy just said to me, She's like, I will be your rock. And she was like, she, and she gave me like a a good luck, like a like a basket of good luck charms and like from all over the world. And it still to this day like sits in my office in the in the an on our location, and I will never touch it because it brought me good luck because I'm here today. And but we continued on our writing journey that actually became something that was really important to me and to both of us because we kind of committed to each other and we were we wanted to do this project. That was a situation where work actually for me was a great distraction from the grief or I mean grief because I was losing something, I was losing my sense of invincibility, you know?

Chelsea Leigh Trescott: 22:08

Right. Oh yeah, totally.

Tracy Dobmeier : 22:12

Yeah, but I also like the work distraction was great. It actually, that was one where it actually really helped me kind of get through that year and come out stronger and feel like I hadn't lost a year of my life and you know, I had something to show for it. And by the time, I mean, we actually queried our agent who we have wonderful representation with, and we queried her from my chemo suite. Like I was hooked up to my you know drugs and got our laptops out and we were eating our egg salad sandwiches, and that sounds good. Yeah, they were so good. Oh my god. We had to get there early.

Wendy Katzman: 22:48

Yeah, we had a we had a whole plan every time we went in.

Chelsea Leigh Trescott: 22:52

What a spirit of resilience, though. You know, not folding on the project because something unexpected and life-threatening was coming your way. That's pretty remarkable. I can't say that I've been that way myself. So that's something to really look up to, I would say. How do you move forward in life when you feel like, okay, you just went through something awful with your husband, you come out on the other side, you have something that you're about to celebrate, and then suddenly something has happened to you. How do you live not being afraid of the potential for another thing to go wrong and to feel like, oh my God, I'm doomed as a person. Oh my God, I have the worst luck in the world. Oh my God, like you said, I'm not invincible. And I think the beauty of youth is often feeling like we are invincible.

Tracy Dobmeier : 23:50

Wow. Okay, that's a that's a really good question. How do you go on? Yeah. So I think for me, and again, I think everybody's different, but for me, I think that what helped me go on was the fact that for every curse that I have felt in my life, I realize I have twice as many blessings. You know, dear friends are a blessing, my children are a blessing, my husband's a blessing, my dog, my, you know, and my like my mom's in-laws and my this father and my dad. I mean, you just you kind of go down the list and you realize like bad stuff happens to everyone at some point. None of us gets out of this alive. And some of us get hit a little bit earlier, maybe a little more frequently with stuff, but you just have to kind of keep pushing to remember the, you know, the good things in your life. I know it sounds a little Pollyanna-ish, but it's for me, it really is what it counterbalances all that stuff and it helps keep me going.

Chelsea Leigh Trescott: 24:51

There's sort of like a gratitude practice. Yeah, it is, it's a gratitude practice.

Wendy Katzman: 24:55

But there's this line from okay, the movie Shaw Shank Redemption. So get busy living or get busy dying. And so it's a choice. And a lot of what we talk about in our relationship is mindset. And there's so many things you can't control in life. And that's just the way life is. And so controlling the things that you can, like your attitude, your effort, who you spend your time with, like that's how we move forward.

Chelsea Leigh Trescott: 25:29

Choice. How did you guys choose the loves in your life to marry? How did it feel like it feels like a choice at the time? I'm sure it felt destined, but did it at any moment feel like your choice?

Wendy Katzman: 25:42

Okay, I'll tell my story first. I met my husband Van.

Chelsea Leigh Trescott: 25:49

Love that name. Yeah, it's a good one.

Wendy Katzman: 25:51

I met him when I was 17 years old in Venezuela. We were there for an athletic competition. I was on the U.S. tennis team and he was on the U.S. soccer team. And a couple weeks later, we were there for a few weeks, and I came home and I told my mom I met the boy I'm gonna marry. And I was headed off to college, and she's like, sure. So he did come to visit my family over Christmas and met my met my family, and we broke up and we went our separate ways. And a couple years later, he had graduated and moved to Washington, DC. And my dad was out running one night on the mall and saw this guy who looked like him. No, went back, looked him up in the phone book. This is how long ago this was. And there he was, called him. It was him, took him out for beers, and came home and said, Here's his number, you guys should get back in touch. Dad did that? Yeah. And so we were friends for many years. And then wasn't your dad just there for a company? Yeah, it was random. Random. Yeah. He doesn't we didn't live there. He was just there for work and just happened to be out running. Dan was out running. So eventually we found each other again and we just celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary.

Chelsea Leigh Trescott: 27:04

Oh my God. I love that story. That's romantic. And destined. And destined. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Tracy Dobmeier : 27:13

Yeah, mine was too in a different way. So my husband, Eric, and I met in college. We were in the same class in college in at Princeton in New Jersey. And it was a class of maybe like 1,200 people. And there were like, I think it was 65% men, 35% women, something like that. The consequences of that is there were so many men that you couldn't really like, you know, sense of all them. And the men all knew who all the women were. So I am told that we had lunch once in a group setting at like one of our, you know, in the dorm or something. And um, I do not remember that at all. So um we apparently did meet and we knew so many people in common in college. In fact, his girlfriend, his long-term girlfriend in college was before she dated Eric, she had dated my college boyfriend's best friend. So I used to go out on double dates with her. That was weird. It was very weird. So, anyway, fast forward senior year, um, Eric and I each apply to a bunch of law schools. We each get into Berkeley on the other side of the country, and we each decided independently, obviously, because we didn't know each other, to um defer a year, worked for a year, and then we Which is when you met my husband. Oh, and that's when I met Wendy's husband. Oh, yeah, during that year in between. So then I flew across the country to start law school a year later, and someone said, Hey, you gotta look up this guy, Eric. You know, he's you know, and I was like, Okay, so I looked him up in what we called the Facebook, it's not Facebook, and he it was an actual book, but have the picture of her when you were gonna be in school, and then I was like, Oh, yeah, probably. No, I remember phone books. But so I looked him up ahead of time and I was like, Oh, yeah, I kind of recognize that face. I, you know, probably have met him somewhere. And we met in the first five minutes of orientation, and then we became really good friends that first year, and then by the second year, we'd started. Then the funny connection about the way that Wendy and I met is that that year between college and law school for me, I worked in Washington, DC, and um I had just broken up with a boyfriend, that was a heartbreak, and was trying to kind of like get back on the horse. And I met a guy at work, and he was very nice and charming. And so we dated for a short period of time. Well, that guy was Van's roommate in DC. So that was how I met Van to begin with. Such a cally, yeah.

Chelsea Leigh Trescott: 29:55

Right. Yeah, so before you were married, yeah.

Tracy Dobmeier : 29:58

Oh yeah, yeah.

Chelsea Leigh Trescott: 29:58

Uh-huh. That's oh, way before.

Tracy Dobmeier : 30:00

Way before. Way before, yes. So that's kind of how when we all we all randomly moved to Seattle as a time as couples, and then we kind of started making connections because I had known Van and my husband and Van kind of kept running into each other in work circles, and then finally we met and we were like, okay, this is for real. Yeah.

Chelsea Leigh Trescott: 30:20

I appreciate the elements like you know, that you were into tennis and Thea's husband was a tennis player, and that you had a good relationship with your in-laws, and Thea has a good relationship with her in-laws. You know, like there's definitely I see some nonfiction elements here, autobiographical elements. Yeah. When you were falling in love, do you guys ever remember feeling fear, like nerves about it?

Tracy Dobmeier : 30:47

Yeah, I felt fear because Eric had, so Eric was still, he was dating someone else during that first year of law school. So we were just friends that first year. Um, we were moot court partners. We got to know each other really just through law school. But we became quite good friends. And so by the time he and his girlfriend broke up that next year, um, we become very good friends. And to the point where I actually was starting to feel like he was like maybe my best friend. Like we're so close. And so when we finally decided to kind of start dating, I was afraid of losing the friendship.

Chelsea Leigh Trescott: 31:25

Yeah.

Tracy Dobmeier : 31:26

Because like I really come to rely on him in a lot of ways. So I was afraid, like, what if we start this and that doesn't work? Right. When then what do we lose? So there was like a sense of that, like kind of holding back a bit in those early days, but quickly got over it.

Chelsea Leigh Trescott: 31:42

Yeah, as we must.

Wendy Katzman: 31:44

Yeah, exactly.

Chelsea Leigh Trescott: 31:46

Yeah.

Wendy Katzman: 31:46

My fear was a little bit maybe more location-based. So we were living in Washington, DC. He just finished law school, and he asked me to move with him to Seattle for two years, and then we could move wherever I wanted to move. And I didn't know anybody in Seattle. And so I was afraid, like, is this real? Like, I'm gonna give up my entire life and move across the country where like you still had to pay for long distance. Again. But we didn't have cell phones. Yeah, my dad was still making jokes about my long distance bill. And really feeling afraid, like to trust, is this real? And is it worth giving up everything? My friends, my family, my career to start over with this person in Seattle. So to take that loop.

Chelsea Leigh Trescott: 32:34

How would you advise someone that's listening? Because I think there's a lot of moments, and I think this is why people are afraid actually of getting into relationships, because they sense that they will have to give something up, something of themselves up. How would you advise someone about yes, we could be losing something, but we could also be gaining an entire life and an entire love?

Wendy Katzman: 32:58

Like every relationship, whether you're moving across the country or you're not, you are gonna I don't want to say give something up, but like you're gonna change. But being in a relationship and sharing your life with another person is like the most wonderful thing in the world.

Chelsea Leigh Trescott: 33:17

Why? Why do you say that?

Wendy Katzman: 33:19

I just feel like for me, it's just been so enriching. And it's not, I mean, it can be a romantic relationship, but even a friend, like this deep friendship that we have is one of like the greatest like loves of my life. It's so enriching to open yourself up and to really be vulnerable. I mean, to be a writing partner with somebody is a level of vulnerability that is similar to your romantic partner. You have to be willing to be open about everything and it's hard, but it's also I just find it's beautiful.

Tracy Dobmeier : 33:56

And there are other ways of finding, I mean, I think what it comes down to is something that we write about and we think about a lot. It's this idea of connection. And connection is what makes us human and it keeps us from being lonely and it makes us like engage in the world and not just like hide in our, you know, rooms on our phones or whatever. You know, I think it's being out in the world and connecting to people and knowing that that you know you've got their back and they've got yours, whether it's a romantic partner or a friend or, you know, or a family member or whatever. I just think that idea of connection. But when you commit to connecting so deeply with someone in any of those ways, you are giving something up because you're saying to that person, I'm gonna be there for you if times are tough. That does require some sacrifice at times, and we all have to be willing to do that. But the, I think what we get out of it is the stuff that like this is gonna sound kind of morbid, but like I once read this article or study or something, I can't remember exactly what it was, but it was a woman who was like kind of a um a hostice worker, a hospice nurse, and she interviewed all these people in like the last days of their lives. Like, asked them, what you know, what do you wish you had done more of? What do you do you have any regrets? And just the only regret that people have is not spending more time with their loved ones. So, you know, that's I I kind of keep that as like a guiding light. And I guess that that's what I would say to people is don't have that regret. You can control that, but it it requires committing to showing up for another person, but it it brings you joy and it brings you peace.

Chelsea Leigh Trescott: 35:36

You know, I've been solo for so many years, and I didn't think it was a fear of love. I just wanted to be super discerning about who I fell in love with because I realized the family that I wanted to have, and I felt like I wasn't in my 20s anymore where I could just say yes to any love that comes my way, you know. So I've been solo and I've been developing a love for others platonically and having really intimate connections, even just, you know, through the podcast, always expanding my heart, right? And now, you know, I've met someone and it is also this reality of, and I haven't felt this way with him, but I can just see it, where it's like, oh my God, when you meet someone, you have to lean in to all the moments. Whereas when you're on your own, you can lean out very easily. But being with someone is choosing to continually lean in and approach and confront and allow and be vulnerable and to constantly, I think, be testing a bit of that fearlessness for the commitment or the chance of, like you guys said so beautifully, like enjoying your life with someone potentially. I've been enjoying my life so separately on my own for so long now that I don't even know what it could be like to enjoy it alongside someone. But I trust and I believe that that would be expansive.

Tracy Dobmeier : 37:05

It definitely can be. But as I said, I do believe that there are all kinds of connections and all kinds of ways to find happiness.

Chelsea Leigh Trescott: 37:12

If I heard someone just saying that happiness was only found within relationships, I probably would have really fought against that. And to this day I would, you know. I think also it just it goes back to kind of what we said in the beginning is like really honoring your path. And if you're on a path right now where it feels more, it feels more even destined to be exploring life on your own or just with friends or, you know, short-term connections, it's really about honoring that and allowing that to take place. Because I do think that life is guiding us all along. I believe in coincidences, I know your book talks about that, but I feel like coincidences are often this, you know, spiritual sign that we are exactly where we are meant to be, even if we think we should be somewhere else. So I think that the more that we can tune into what the voice inside of us is telling us to go after or be with, the more chances that we will weave ourselves toward the connections that are meant for now.

Wendy Katzman: 38:12

I absolutely agree with that. Like going back to the whole idea of being busy, I think that can mask that voice. And you have to be very careful with this illusion of busyness.

Chelsea Leigh Trescott: 38:26

Yes.

Wendy Katzman: 38:27

Because then you can't hear. And it's really important to hear your own voice in your own head, in your own heart, and your own stomach, your gut, of where you need to be and what you need to be doing. And yes, everybody's on their own path.

Chelsea Leigh Trescott: 38:44

Are you guys in California in Los Angeles? Or was it just a setting of the book because I got less busy on the streets that you talk about in this book. It was so wild to read because I left New York and I've been healing myself out in LA. And you spoke about Montana Avenue and Pete's Coffee. And I wrote this piece about busyness and choosing to go on these back streets far from home to heal and befriend myself and this whole piece about it, and it just reminded me so much of these walks that I was taking that were right where you guys were speaking about.

Tracy Dobmeier : 39:22

Yeah. So I mean, we live in Seattle, but I grew up in Los Angeles, and Wendy and I both have family still in LA and friends and that sort of thing. So um, yeah, so I've spent a lot of time down there.

Chelsea Leigh Trescott: 39:34

It was a great backdrop. It felt like it felt amazing that I was reading it. That's really amazing. Yeah, that's a coincidence, yeah. You also like Pete's Coffee? I don't, but I went right by there and there were all these hot guys sitting outside of it, and I was like, I should probably stop going to Starbucks and just come right here. Yeah, right. Funny. Yeah. What else? Is there something that I, you know, I don't normally ask my guests, but is there something that's on you guys' heart that you want to speak about within the book or within the framework of being thankful for heartbreak?

Tracy Dobmeier : 40:12

I mean, the only thing I can think of that kind of really just relates to Thea and her journey and is something that I think we've talked about a lot as like just a theme for how we want to live our lives is just this idea of um like being kind to ourselves um as a way of healing, but also part of that is you have to give grace to others. Everyone has a different, you know, set of circumstances that they're dealing with. Everyone has, you know, everyone has their own issues. And um, you know, while there are certainly people who I think, you know, we just don't want to necessarily have anything to do with because they're just bringing us down. I mean, that that's a real thing. But I think a lot of people really mean well. And if we can kind of see it in our hearts to just give a little bit of grace, have a little forgiveness, you know, just be open, like what comes back to us in that situation is just more love. And I think no one has enough love, like, right? How do you have enough?

Chelsea Leigh Trescott: 41:19

I love the aspect though of being kind to ourselves because that is the ultimate relationship, right? The one that we have with ourselves. And I know that for myself, I felt like the biggest heartbreak of all was just how mean I was to myself. Never looked really that way on the outside. That's not true. I mean, I had an eating disorder. So I know at that time it was very clear that I must not have a good relationship with myself. But over time, after I healed that, I think it was very surprising to people to learn that internally the voice was so cruel toward myself. And I just think it's such an interesting thing that we can be so kind to others and yet so cruel within. And yet I have seen how by giving and generating love for yourself, how that really attracts a different kind of love to you. So I appreciate that you brought that part up because in the midst of heartbreak, I think so often we can really berate ourselves or we can internalize the feedback that a partner has given to us about who we were within that relationship, whether true or not. Or we think that because something hasn't worked, we must be failures. So is there anything that you might recommend to someone to help them introduce kindness to themselves? Hmm. Read a lot of fiction.

Tracy Dobmeier : 42:40

In other worlds. Yeah, it's instructive. It is instructive. I think fiction allows us to put ourselves in someone else's shoes for a little bit and try out how we might handle certain situations. And it allows us to like see the positive outcomes and the negative outcomes. And I do think that having that openness to just understanding different worlds and different people and how they think and how they operate is like a very useful tool for handling heartbreak and for learning how to care about yourself and how to also, you know, kind of open up your heart to others.

Wendy Katzman: 43:19

I would add on to that volunteering, looking for opportunities where you are lifting up others, because I think that is like such a good first step in getting out of your own head, out of your own way to feeling good when you do something kind with no expectation of anything in return, but just looking for opportunities to lift up other people. Or ants.

Chelsea Leigh Trescott: 43:44

Or animals, yeah. Or the environment. Yeah, no, I think that's smart. I remember during a really challenging time in my life, really beginning to read nonfiction. And I think it can be any genre, but I felt like it was really important to bring another line of thought into my own mind because the thought that I was spiraling with was so destructive. So I think what you're saying about bringing fiction in and volunteering, which is about others basically seeing a narrative that is beyond our own, is beneficial. Yeah, it helps bring a lot of perspective. I coined the word break upward, like the direction. I'm curious what might come through to you guys when you hear that word, break upward.

Wendy Katzman: 44:33

That's a really interesting thought because I do love it. It's very creative. Like the idea that with every heartbreak, ideally you learn. We ended up with these wonderful guys, but there was heartbreak before, but like with each goodbye, you learn. And you're learning about yourself, you're learning about what you want, what you want from a partner, from a relationship. And so that idea of breaking upward as you coin, that's great. That you're taking a little bit of something each time and moving forward.

Chelsea Leigh Trescott: 45:09

You know, you've been through your own personal heartbreaks and then witnessing the one with your your husband, but also your mother. Um is there a reason that you could give or that comes to you about why you are thankful for heartbreak after the ones you've endured?

Tracy Dobmeier : 45:28

I would give anything to have my mom here with me. But at the same time, I think sometimes when you lose something or someone so important to you, it does kind of like you're breaking upward. You have to rise to the occasion, you know, to suddenly like I was like, how am I gonna raise babies without a mom to ask, you know? And so you have to trust your instincts more, you have to trust yourself, but you also learn to find people in your life who are not necessarily like stand-in moms, like there's no substitute for your real mom, but you find people who are open and you know and excited about being kind of like a part of your life. And so you build these new relationships and you kind of, you know, and you get you you do get a lot out of that. Because I think, you know, I think if you have your own mom right there telling you everything to do, and you, you know, you might just kind of rely on that and not have these other rich opportunities to kind of spread your wings and, you know, and come into contact with more, you know, more people, more philosophies, more life. So with every torturous grief, I do think that there's an opportunity on the other side to grow personally and to grow your network and your connections, have a good life.

Chelsea Leigh Trescott: 46:48

Is there a way that you have found you are able to connect with her?

Tracy Dobmeier : 46:53

Sometimes I wish I did more. I wish I had more of like a spiritual sense that she's like watching me all the time or something, but I don't really feel that. I just feel like when I see my kids and you know, like one of my sons has her eyes and you know, has her stubbornness and you know, and has there's just when I see little little mirror, traces and little things come out, little traces of her, it just makes me it just makes my heart feel full. Yeah. And it makes me feel like a part of her that's still here and and you know, with us. Yeah, that's amazing.

Chelsea Leigh Trescott: 47:28

I can't imagine being able to look into my child's eyes and see my parent. You know, I never even thought of that possibility. That's special. Thank you both. It's amazing that you guys have collaborated together. You know, we've talked about romantic relationships, and I think that's a a massive collaboration. But what you guys have done together is also such an achievement, you know. Like I I it's so amazing that you wrote something together and that it's as big of a page turner that it is. I love that it's very meta and congratulations. It's a success for sure. Well, thank you.

Wendy Katzman: 48:06

Thanks so much, Jade, for having us today. This is a really interesting conversation.

Chelsea Leigh Trescott: 48:12

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Congratulations on the book, but also congratulations on the friendship. Before we go, I just want to say thank you. Thank you for being here, for listening with your whole heart, and for letting these conversations meet you wherever you are. If this episode resonated, the simplest way you can support the podcast is by sharing it with someone you love or someone who might need it more than they realize. You can also leave a review, which does wonders, wherever you're listening. It really does help this show find the people it's meant for. And if something stirred in you while you're listening, I'd love to hear from you. You can write me directly at Chelsea C H E L S E A at breakupward.com B-R E A K U P W A R D dot com. Or come find me on Instagram where I have been posting more at Thank You Heartbreak. Until next time, keep choosing honesty, keep choosing softness, and keep breaking upward. All my love always Chelsea.