Everything in life comes back to feelings.
And yet feelings are the thing so many of us avoid at all costs.
I know this because I was a pro at avoiding mine. A professional avoider. I numbed them, ran from them, drowned them out. And I didn’t really understand them until I got sober.
Sobriety forces you to feel. There’s no numbing agent, no escape hatch. And that’s when it hit me: the substance wasn’t the real problem—it was just a bad-tasting band-aid. The problem was me not knowing how to sit with my feelings.
And once you start facing them, you realize how much of life revolves around feelings. Connection. Joy. Pain. Even the things we chase—money, boats, big houses—they’re never really about the thing. They’re about the feeling we think that thing will give us.
So why weren’t we taught how to deal with our feelings? Why do we shame each other for them? Imagine if we actually sat around the dinner table again and asked:
What was your high this week?
What was your low?
And how did you feel about it?
And then someone across from you says, “I’ve felt that way too. Here’s what helped me.” That’s connection. That’s what heals.