How to Stop Ruminating on What You Should Have Said

I was at a red light on a Tuesday, going nowhere important, when the perfect sentence arrived.

Not a big one. Not a movie line. Just: “You don’t get to decide what I meant when I already told you what I meant.” Six words too late to matter, three years too late to say to anyone who was still listening. The light turned green. I didn’t move for a second. The car behind me honked, and I drove forward with a sentence in my mouth that had nowhere left to go.

For a long time I called this overthinking. That was the soft word — the one that made it sound like a personality trait instead of what it actually was. Overthinkers replay dinner parties. What was happening to me was closer to a trial I never got to argue, for a verdict that had been written before I opened my mouth the first time.

My somatic therapist — the second one, the one I started seeing four months after I left — had a name for it that I didn’t like the first time I heard it, because it was too accurate to be comfortable.

“You’re not replaying the argument. You’re rehearsing for a version of him that was never going to show up. The rehearsal isn’t broken. It’s loyal — to a listener who doesn’t exist.”

I call this The Standing Trial — the case that never got to close, so some part of you keeps showing up to argue it, alone, at red lights, for no jury, on a Tuesday.

This isn’t a post about how to win an argument you already lost. I don’t have that. What I have is five things that finally let The Standing Trial recess — not forever, but long enough to live in.

1. Recognize the Trial for What It’s Actually Litigating

The Case You Think You’re Making

I thought I was preparing for the next fight. I wasn’t. I was trying to win the last one, retroactively, alone, years later, against a man who wasn’t even thinking about it.

The Standing Trial isn’t about the sentence. It’s about the verdict — the one where he finally, actually understands what he did. That verdict was never on the table. Not because I argued badly. Because the court was never real.

You are not losing the argument.

You are re-trying a case that was dismissed before it opened.

2. Confirm the Conversation Was Never Available

The Court That Was Never in Session

With Emeka, an argument didn’t end when we stopped talking. It ended when he’d rewritten it enough that I doubted what I’d walked in saying in the first place. There was no version of my words landing clean, because landing clean was never the goal. Outlasting me was.

The Standing Trial keeps convening because some part of me still believes a better closing argument exists. It doesn’t. Not because I lack the vocabulary. Because the other side never intended to rule.

This isn’t about the words you chose.

It’s about a courtroom that was never actually open.

3. Let the Trial Run Its Full Session, Once

What Happens When You Stop Adjourning It Early

For a long time I cut the thought off the second it started, like it was shameful to still be doing this three years out. That made it come back harder, at worse times — once mid-call at work, once at Funmilayo’s kitchen table while she was mid-sentence about something else entirely.

Now I let the whole session run. The imagined room. Him actually listening. Actually ruling in my favor, for once. I let myself feel exactly how badly I still want that verdict, sometimes, for no reason, on a Tuesday. It’s grief wearing a legal argument. Grief doesn’t stay quiet just because you’ve told it the case is closed.

This isn’t a relapse.

It’s a session the court never got to finish the first time.

4. Stop Grading Your Closing Statement

The Verdict Was Never About the Wording

I used to rank my unsaid comebacks like I’d be tested on them later. That one was better. I should have led with that one. But no sentence was ever going to change the ruling — he wasn’t losing sleep over my phrasing, he was rewriting the whole event before I’d finished my first draft.

The grading system was the last place I was still trying to control a courtroom that had never once been mine to run.

The reframeThis isn’t a case you’re still losing. It’s a case that was never going to be decided on the evidence — because the man on the other side of it was never actually a judge.

5. Read the Silence as Testimony, Not Verdict

What The Standing Trial Was Actually Proving

This is the one that finally moved something. All those unsaid sentences weren’t lost arguments. They were evidence — of how fast I’d learned to decide, mid-thought, that a sentence wasn’t safe to finish out loud in that apartment.

Ngozi told me once, gently, that she’d never heard me finish an argument with him — always trailing off halfway, it’s fine, never mind. I used to think that meant I didn’t have much to say.

It meant I had a great deal to say.

And I had gotten frighteningly efficient at making sure none of it cost me anything.

I don’t drive past that intersection differently now. The Standing Trial still convenes, out of nowhere, for no one, on ordinary days.

I’ve stopped taking it as a sign I’m not over him.

It isn’t proof I’m still stuck.

It’s proof of how long I went without a voice in that room — finally, in its own time, testifying. Even if the only one left to hear it is me.