Confessions from someone who feels everything and runs
Audio version (8-minute listen):
There is something I need to tell you, and I am going to say it plainly because I have spent too many years dressing it up in more acceptable language: I am a feelings dodger.
I know. Coming from someone who teaches rest and nervous system healing and sits with women in circles where we speak the unspeakable, it sounds like a contradiction. But stay with me here. The most important truths usually do sound like contradictions.
I feel emotions deeply. I always have. As a child, I was the one who could walk into a room and feel the weather of it before anyone said a word. I could sense the tension beneath a polite dinner, the sadness hiding behind someone’s laughter, the grief that lived in the walls of certain houses. I was made this way, tuned to the frequency of feeling the way some people are tuned to music or mathematics.
And then came the messaging.
If you don’t have control over your emotions, those emotions are useless and harmful — to you and to others.
I don’t remember the first time I heard it, but I remember the way it settled into my body like a stone dropped into deep water. It sank and stayed. And a part of me, the part that wanted to be good, to be safe, to be acceptable, began to build her life around it.
So I became a dodger.
Not the kind that looks like avoidance. No, my dodging was far more sophisticated than that. In the early days, it looked like ambition. I stayed ferociously busy through my career, pouring every ounce of that deep feeling into doing. I became the one who had opinions about everyone else’s life, my family, my extended family, my friends. I had advice at the ready for every one of them. I could sit across from someone, see exactly what they needed, name it with precision, and offer a path forward.
For everyone but myself.
Because here is the trick of the feelings dodger: when you are so busy attending to everyone else’s emotional landscape, no one notices, least of all you, that you have completely abandoned your own.
And for a while, it worked. It worked the way all coping mechanisms work, brilliantly, until they don’t.
And then it didn’t.
The “didn’t” is where the body starts to speak. Because the body always keeps the score, doesn’t it? When we refuse to feel, the feelings don’t simply evaporate. They take up residence. They become physical ailments, the kind that have you sitting in doctors’ offices, and nobody can find a clear cause. They become dramatic emotional peaks and valleys, the eruptions that happen when you’ve held something down for so long it has no choice but to blow. And eventually, underneath all of that noise, there it was: the quiet, devastating sadness of being so disconnected from my truest self.
That sadness. That was the one I had been dodging the hardest.
I want to pause here and say something to you, because if you are reading this and recognizing yourself, I need you to hear this: the dodging was never a character flaw. It was a survival strategy. It was the smartest thing a deeply feeling child could do with the information she was given. We do not shame the strategies that kept us alive. We honor them. And then, gently, when we are ready, we set them down.
Last year, I started a podcast. I called it Stay Close, and it was born from a line by the poet David Whyte that had been living inside me for years: “The most courageous thing we can do is stay close to the way we are made.”
When I first read those words, I wept. Not the polite kind of crying. The kind that comes from somewhere ancient in you, the kind that says, finally, someone has named the thing I have been circling for my entire life.
Because that is what I have been doing. Circling. Spending most of my life trying to get back, back to the way I was made before the messaging told me to move away from my lifeblood. Before I was taught that the very thing that made me me, my emotions, my deep feelings, the full-body experience of being alive, was dangerous and needed to be controlled.
My emotions were never the problem. The belief that they were, that was the wound.
And undoing that belief? It is, I will tell you honestly, the work of a lifetime. It is not a weekend workshop. It is not a single breakthrough. It is a daily practice of staying close when everything in you has been trained to dodge. It is the slow, tender work of saying to yourself, over and over: You are allowed to feel this. This is safe. This is yours.
So here I am, writing to you from my corner by the sea, a woman who teaches rest and healing and surrender, telling you that I am still, still, learning to stay close to the way I was made. That some mornings I wake up and my first instinct is still to dodge. To reach for the to-do list, the concern for someone else, the familiar comfort of living in everyone’s story but my own.
But I am learning. Through rest. Through the deep, quiet practice of letting my nervous system finally settle. Through sitting still long enough for the feelings to find me, because they always do, when we stop running.
I am a feelings dodger. And the most courageous thing I can do is stay close to the way I was made. 🙏
