Permission to Wallow

This is the last letter in the series, and it is the one I most wanted to write.

Every letter before this one offered you something to do. A document to pull, a number to find, a step to take in the next two weeks. That was deliberate, because action is genuinely stabilizing and because most women arrive at this work having been told to feel their feelings by people who then left them alone with a filing cabinet.

But there is a version of all that advice that becomes another job. Another way to be productive about something that is not a productivity problem. And if you have been reading these letters while quietly thinking that what you actually need is to lie down on the floor for a while, this letter is for you.

Wallowing has a bad name it did not earn

We use the word as an accusation. She is wallowing. Meaning she has stayed too long, indulged herself, failed to move on according to a schedule that nobody wrote down but everybody seems to know.

What we are actually describing, most of the time, is a woman taking the amount of time the thing requires.

There is a cultural preference in this country for a particular kind of recovery. Fast, visible, forward-facing, and above all reassuring to observers. We admire the woman who was back at work in three weeks. We are less comfortable with the woman who is still not right in month fourteen, and our discomfort tends to arrive at her door dressed as concern.

I have sat with a great many women in the middle of the worst year of their lives. I have never once seen someone benefit from being hurried.

What the performance actually costs

Here is where this becomes a financial letter after all, because being fine before you are fine is expensive.

Women who are performing recovery make decisions to demonstrate that they are functioning. They sell the house to prove they have moved on. They return to work before they are able, and then make errors, and then lose ground. They say yes to a financial arrangement in a meeting because saying I cannot think about this right now would reveal something. They accept the first professional recommendation offered, because asking questions would take a second appointment, and a second appointment would mean they still needed help.

The through line is that the decision is being made for an audience.

A woman who has given herself permission to be exactly as unfinished as she is does not need the decision to communicate anything. She can say, plainly, that she is not deciding this month. That single sentence, available and unembarrassed, prevents more financial damage than any strategy I could recommend.

How to wallow well

There is a version of this that helps and a version that does not, and the difference is not duration. It is structure.

Keep the floor in place. Three things stay running no matter what: your housing, your insurance, and the minimum payments that protect your credit. Automate them if you have not already. That is the whole obligation. Everything else can genuinely be left.

Give it a container. An afternoon, a Sunday, a season. Not because grief obeys a container, but because a woman who has designated the time is far less likely to be ambushed by it at ten in the morning in a conference room.

Be witnessed at least once. Wallowing alone in a house with the phone off is a different activity from wallowing in the presence of one person who is not trying to fix you. The second one moves. The first one tends to calcify.

Decline the audience. You are permitted to stop reporting on your progress. Thank you for asking, I am taking my time, is a complete answer and requires no follow-up.

And put nothing permanent in it. That is the only real rule.

The one financial rule for a season like this

No irreversible decisions.

That is it. Not no decisions. Groceries, bills, ordinary life, all of it continues. What waits is anything that cannot be undone: selling the house, moving states, large gifts, liquidating investments, signing a settlement you have not slept on, buying a product from someone who found you rather than the other way around.

Reversible decisions can be made badly and repaired. Irreversible ones cannot, and they are precisely the ones that people around you will be encouraging, because they resolve the situation, and the situation is what is making everyone uncomfortable.

Ninety days is the standard I use in my own practice. Six months is better for anything large. A year is not unreasonable for a house. Nobody has ever come back to me a year later and said they regretted waiting.

And then, at some point

It changes. Not because you did the work correctly, and not on the anniversary, and rarely in a way you notice on the day.

You will find yourself interested in something. You will make a plan more than a week out. You will open the folder without the dread. It arrives sideways and usually after you have stopped waiting for it, which is one of the reasons the waiting itself is not the useful part.

When that happens, the practical work is still there and it will still be doable, and you will do it faster and better than you would have in month two.

The letters will be here. So will I.

Thinking Toolkit: four questions to sit with

Or not. This is the one letter where skipping the exercises is an entirely acceptable outcome.

You are allowed to be exactly as unfinished as you are. The paperwork will keep. The decisions that matter will still be there, and you will be in better shape to make them.

Take the time. Nobody who loves you is keeping score, and the ones who are keeping score were never the ones to plan around.

One honest caveat, said plainly. There is a difference between grieving at your own pace and being unable to get through the day. If the weight is not shifting at all, or you are struggling with your own safety, please talk to someone. Your physician is a reasonable first call, and 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, is available at any hour by call or text. Asking for help is not the end of the wallowing. It is what makes it possible to finish it.

If this spoke to you

This is the closing letter of the series. The fourteen before it are gathered on the Healing Paths page, organized by what a woman is carrying rather than by what she has been diagnosed with. When you are ready, one of them will be the door.

I write letters like this one a few times a month for At the Threshold, a free newsletter for women navigating the financial side of a life in transition. No urgency, no selling, just the thinking I would share with a friend across the table. You are welcome to join.

If you would rather talk than read, you can schedule a conversation. There is no agenda attached to it, and no obligation to have decided anything first.

Teresa McAlpine, CDFA, BFA, is a Behavioral Financial Advisor trained in financial trauma and financial therapy, based in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. She works with women navigating divorce, widowhood, caregiving, and disruption through Threshold Compass Strategies.