Let's Relieve Regret: A self-help podcast about forgiving yourself · Shadoe and Victoria

From Awkward Silences to Bikini Waxes

·1 hr 14 min·4 clips

Victoria says Inside Out 2 made her cry in a 19-plus theater and felt “so good” to release it.

Victoria Mirabersia welcomes listeners back and frames the show as another just-the-two-of-us episode. She says there are guests coming up in the next week, but for now it feels good to stay with the two hosts and let the conversation wander a little, back to the classic season one style. Shadow Ball checks in on a scale of one to ten and lands around a 7 or 7.5. The day is not awful, but the crampiness is real and gets named more than once. From that bodily check-in, the episode turns toward regret, fear, and the ways people learn to keep themselves safe. Shadow says those middle-school years, like grade six through eight, were the worst stretch, and even the first part of grade nine still felt rough. They would rather repeat high school than repeat grades seven and eight. That memory opens into a reflection on coming out of a quiet shell and finding a way to move through other people without getting hurt. Shadow explains that being loud and outgoing became a kind of shield. If they were already the funny, talkative one, then nobody could quite catch them off guard with a joke without risking one back. The personality was less a performance for its own sake than a way to feel defended. Victoria helps name that as a default setting, something built under pressure rather than chosen in calm. The two keep circling the same idea from different angles, which gives the conversation its warm, in-process feel. They talk about how that kind of safety strategy can overlap with people pleasing without being exactly the same thing. The episode also reaches for a language that was not really available in the 1980s and 1990s, when a lot of these patterns were just lived and not yet named. Victoria notes the value of newer language around introversion and neurodivergence. That language makes the old story easier to hold with less shame. The Inside Out reference gives the conversation an easy shorthand for what anxiety can feel like when it is running the console. The show keeps the emotional center on self-forgiveness rather than diagnosis. By the end, the episode leaves you with a plain, compassionate idea: the loud or guarded version of yourself may have started as protection, and it deserves understanding before it deserves correction.

As heard by us

A candid, conversational look at how a louder persona can become armor, and how that armor gets built.

Victoria Mirabersia and Shadow Ball start with a candid check-in before the episode settles into a familiar but sharp idea: middle school can harden a person into someone louder, funnier, and quicker to push back. The show treats that posture as a kind of armor.

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Why you'd press play

If your awkward phase still feels like the main character.

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