Why Starting Over Is So Hard to Talk About

There is a pause that follows when a woman tells someone she is starting over. It is rarely unkind. The other person's face softens, their head tilts a little, and out comes a gentle "Oh, I'm so sorry," even though nobody said anything sad. Picture a woman who has just closed the boutique she ran for six years, or left a marriage, or walked away from a career she spent a decade building. She learns fast that "I'm starting over" and "I'm starting something new" are received very differently, and she begins editing herself before she opens her mouth.

The loss no one sends flowers for

Starting over begins with an ending, and an ending is a loss even when you chose it. Grief researcher Kenneth Doka coined the term disenfranchised grief in 1989 for a loss that cannot be openly acknowledged, publicly mourned, or socially supported. He has explained that grief is a response to loss in general and not only to death, and he counts the loss of a job among the losses people feel they have no right to mourn. A funeral comes with cards, casseroles, and time off work. A closed business or a finished marriage comes with the question "So what's next?", which asks the grieving person to skip straight to the recovery. When the world offers no ritual for a loss, the person carrying it often decides the safest thing is to carry it quietly.

Failure has a social price

Researchers who study business owners have measured what that silence is protecting people from. Sharon Simmons, Johan Wiklund, and Jonathan Levie used Global Entrepreneurship Monitor data from 23 countries and found that where the stigma around business failure was strongest, entrepreneurs whose businesses had failed were less likely to start another one. Their measure of stigma included more than public attitudes. It also included how much a country's own laws and procedures marked a failed business. They noted that stigma pushes some people the other way, driving them to prove the failure wrong, but the overall pattern was hesitation. The same team later studied 8,171 entrepreneurs in 35 countries and found that gender gaps in who started again persisted and shifted with the levels of public stigma and fear of failure. This research concerns business owners, and it is fair to wonder whether the same instinct appears after a divorce or a career change. It probably does, though that is a question for other studies to settle.

We hide these stories even from ourselves

Psychologists Lauren Eskreis-Winkler and Ayelet Fishbach, connected to the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, studied what they call hidden failures. In their work, published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes in 2020, most people were more reluctant to share their failures than their successes. The reluctance held even when participants were asked to share with their own future selves, which suggests the silence is not only about impressing other people. That fits what many women describe during a restart. The story is still unfinished, and telling it out loud makes it official. A woman who has spent years being the one who has it together may also feel that admitting a restart means handing back a role everyone assumed she would keep.

Talking helps some people and wears others out

Management scholar Dean Shepherd wrote in the Academy of Management Review in 2003 that losing a business can cause grief, and that this grief can get in the way of learning from what happened. He has since explained that some people feel better after talking about a failure, while for others dwelling on it makes the emotions worse. The people who learned the most and felt ready to try again moved back and forth between facing the loss and taking a break from it. Grief researchers call these loss orientation and restoration orientation. This matters for anyone wondering how much to say. The goal is not to tell the whole story to everyone, and it is not to go silent either. It is to move between processing and resting, and to choose the right people for each.

People tend to meet you better than you expect

Michael Kardas, Amit Kumar, and Nicholas Epley ran a series of experiments, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2022, on how people predict deeper conversations will go. Participants expected conversations with strangers to feel more awkward and less connecting than they turned out to be, and the gap was widest for deep conversations. The researchers traced this to one misjudgment, which was that people expected others to care less about their personal disclosures than others did. Most participants who had both a shallow and a deep conversation expected to prefer the shallow one, then preferred the deep one and felt more connected to that partner. The experiments used strangers in structured settings where everyone had agreed to answer questions, so they do not promise that every disclosure goes well. They do suggest that the dread you feel before saying the sentence out loud may be harsher than what usually happens.

How to start saying it

Begin by saying the sentence to yourself in plain words. Write it on paper or in your notes app, and keep it short and true, something like "I closed my business in June and I am rebuilding." Read it aloud once or twice, because the first time you say it will be the hardest, and it is better to have that first time with no one watching. You are not writing a speech. You are finding out what the sentence sounds like in your own voice.

Next, choose one person and not an audience. Pick someone who has handled your hard news before, who does not rush to fix things, and who can hold a story without repeating it to others. One conversation with one person matches the kind of exchange the conversation research studied, and it gives you a chance to see that being heard does not require a crowd. If nobody comes to mind, a counselor, a coach, or a small group of women in a similar season can fill the same role.

Then tell that person what you need before you begin. You might say, "I am not looking for advice right now. I would like to say something out loud and have you listen." Most people want to help and will jump to solutions unless they are told otherwise, so this one sentence protects both of you. If you do want ideas, you can say that too, and you can say it later in the conversation.

After that, give the conversation a shape. Shepherd's finding about moving between facing a loss and resting from it can become a simple practice. Talk about it for a set amount of time, perhaps twenty minutes, and then do something that has nothing to do with it, such as a walk, a meal, or a favorite show. Come back to the subject on another day. If you notice that talking leaves you feeling worse each time, that is information worth taking to a professional, and it is not a sign that you are doing it wrong.

Finally, decide on your public sentence for everyone else. Colleagues, neighbors, and acquaintances do not need the whole story, and you do not owe it to them. A short and true line works well, such as "I closed the shop and I am figuring out what comes next." Said calmly, it tends to end the pause before it starts, because you have already shown the other person how to receive it.

Why the telling is worth it

Fishbach has described information about failure as a public good, meaning that one person's honesty can spare another person the same wrong turn. A restart is also information of a kind we rarely get, because we mostly hear about the ending a woman chose to announce and almost never about the middle. The next woman who is standing in her own pause, wondering whether anyone else has been where she is, needs to hear that someone has. Saying it quietly to one person is a fine way to begin. The pause after "I'm starting over" shortens each time someone says the sentence anyway.