Chelsea Handler is doing just fine.
In the wake of her breakup with comedian Jo Koy, which she announced in an Instagram post Monday, it turns out that she’s feeling emotional, but able to cope with things.
“I’m OK. I feel, you know, optimistic about the future now. I’ve changed so much. My love was, like, so big that it just blew me open,” she told Glennon Doyle on the podcast “We Can Do Hard Things” Thursday. Her voice quavered as she continued, “As painful as the ending of something like that is, I’m so well-versed in therapy and understanding that every door shutting is a new beginning.”
Friends for decades, Handler, 47, and Koy, 51, transformed that relationship into a love affair that lasted nearly a year. They made it Instagram official last September, but on Monday she posted a video the two of them had prepared before the breakup, with a note saying they were done.
Handler told Doyle that being in therapy has helped her find her “toolkit” of ways to cope. Those mechanisms include meditation, reading and reflection. “Sitting in my backyard and looking at the trees and thinking about everything that has transpired and all the good things that I got out of this,” she said.
Feeling the grief is critical, she noted. “Knowing that when you’re in pain to sit with it, not to go away or take an edible, even though I always love edibles, not to try to numb your pain is what I’ve learned and that is the best way to get through grief in a responsible and healthy way where it’s not going to sneak up on you later.”
She said, “I had to have a conversation with myself about how much — I wasn’t going to abandon myself. If I have to choose one person, I have to choose myself.”
And as she noted, she’s hopeful for the future — a future she could still see with fellow comedian Koy.
“I still believe my person is coming. Whether that is Jo Koy at a certain time or if it’s not, I accept that,” said Handler, who is producing a new TV series, “Unspeakable.”
“We all want to know when we’re breaking up what the answers are, but that’s part of the unknowing, that’s part of the maturity, is to sit in the unknowing and still function and just go, ‘Yeah, this is where I am right now. Nothing is breaking me,'” she added.
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