I didn't know my mother long enough
She died when I was young. And for years, the way I dealt with that was to not deal with it. Keep moving. Stay busy. Build things. Box. Travel. Fill the space with enough forward momentum that the grief couldn't find traction.
It found traction eventually. It always does.
The thing about unfelt emotion is that it doesn't disappear. It just changes form. It becomes irritability. Distance. A short fuse over something small. A heaviness you can't explain to the person lying next to you because you don't fully understand it yourself.
A researcher named James Pennebaker spent years studying what happens when people write about their hardest experiences. Twenty minutes a day. Seven consecutive days. No stopping, no editing, no audience. Just the truth of what happened and what it cost. The results were significant. | Immune function improved. Anxiety dropped. People described feeling lighter in a way they hadn't expected from something so simple.
Simple is not the same as easy. Writing for twenty minutes about the thing you've been managing for years is not easy. But it is available to you tonight while you're sitting with the version of yourself that doesn't have to hold it together for anyone.
You don't need a therapist's couch or a retreat or the right moment. You need a notebook and enough honesty to stop performing okayness for twenty minutes.
The weight that lifts is felt. I know because I've felt it. I know because I've watched men and women in my community feel it too.
Seven days. That's all. Write the thing you haven’t deared to say out loud yet. And then the other thing and the other thing, until there are no stories left to tell.
