leftovers

When we suppress emotions, they don’t just disappear (I know ugh). One of my clients used to say he’d put his emotions in his “back pocket,” and I’d usually reply with, “You mean your volcano.”

Our metaphorical back pocket isn’t so metaphorical—we have a bunch of them, scattered throughout our bodies. Our hips, stomach, hearts, even our cells can overflow and ache from all the moments of energy we’ve tucked away.

If they aren’t already becoming bodily pains or illness, these stored sensations may erupt, periodically. An orchestra of all those ‘tiny’ moments you didn’t process fully over the past week (or weeks) come together in a messy, overwhelming mix.

Leftover feelings don’t taste as good. The texture is off. Their lack of freshness feels sour and wrong. Sometimes, we mistake them for depression or convince ourselves that something’s deeply wrong with our lives. It can feel like a dam bursting, flooding us with urgency and confusion—a so-called “mental breakdown” that pushes us to make big, dramatic life changes. Maybe you quit your job or got a dog. Maybe, in hindsight, you look back fondly and decide you’ll keep using your back pocket method. And hey! You get to! I just wonder how many times your dam can rebuild itself. I wonder who you'd become if you savored fresh emotions, as they unfolded.

~Questions to chew on~

Do you really need those floods to make changes in your life? What if, instead, you listened to the sensations—whether new, painful, or even joyful—and let them take shape? Accepted them with curiosity? What could those little pieces of energy in motion reveal about your life? What smaller, quieter shifts could you make while staying connected to your body? And what destruction might you avoid by sitting with your discomfort, safely and intentionally?