My Story: The Courage to Feel

 My story of coming back is just starting. I don't have all the answers, and I don't know the ending. But I've learned where the new beginning is. It’s not in pretending I'm okay. It's not in pushing through the pain. It starts in a much quieter, more difficult place: recognizing what I'm feeling.

For the longest time, after being knocked down time and again, my first instinct was to get up and start swinging, or to numb the pain, or to find someone to blame. As researcher Brené Brown puts it, I was "off-loading hurt". I would either:

• Chandelier: Pushing the pain down until a small, unrelated comment would send me into a rage.

• Bounce the hurt: My ego would jump in, blaming others to protect myself because it's so much easier to be angry than to admit "I'm hurt".

• Numb it: Trying to make the discomfort go away with anything that offered quick relief, but as Brown notes, when we numb the dark emotions, we also numb the light ones like joy and love.

I was trying to solve the problem from under a rock of shame, convinced I was a screwup, not that I had

made a mistake. But you can't make good decisions from under that rock.

The true turning point, the first step on the path back, is what Brown calls

"The Reckoning". It is the moment we choose courage over comfort and decide to walk into our story. This begins with two deceptively simple acts:

1. Recognizing Emotion: Acknowledging that we are feeling something. It doesn’t have to be precise. It can be as simple as saying, "I'm in a lot of pain," "My stomach is in knots," or "I just want to punch a wall". The goal is simply to recognize that emotions are in play.

2. Getting Curious: Instead of reacting, we ask questions. "What's really going on here?" "Why am I having such a strong reaction?" As Brown says, "Curiosity is a shit-starter. But that’s okay. Sometimes we have to rumble with a story to find the truth".

This process is so vital because, as neuroscientists have found, humans are "feeling machines that think". We can't engineer an emotional process into an easy formula; we have to feel our way through it. To deny our emotions is to let them own us.

This is where true resilience begins. Resilience isn't the absence of distress; in fact, feeling distress is a normal part of the process. In

Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life's Greatest Challenges, the authors explain that you can't be considered resilient unless you've actually faced challenges. The process of rising strong is how we cultivate wholeheartedness. It is the journey that teaches us the most about who we are.

When we fall, our brain is wired to make up a story to make sense of what happened. This first story, our "shitty first draft" as author Anne Lamott calls it, is often a conspiracy theory driven by emotion and the need to self-protect. It’s rarely accurate.

By recognizing and getting curious about our emotions, we give ourselves the chance to challenge that first story. We begin to

"Rumble" with it. We start asking:

• What more do I need to understand about this situation?

• What assumptions am I making?

• What part did I play?

This is how we find the "delta"—the difference between the story we made up in our hurt and the truth we discover by being brave enough to feel. That delta is where wisdom lives.

I'm still in the messy middle of my story. But I now know that you can't skip this part. You can't get to a brave new ending without walking through the reckoning and the rumble. It starts by giving yourself permission to feel. It’s the bravest thing you will ever do, because it’s the moment you stop letting your story be defined by the fall and start writing your own ending. My revolution has just begun.