How hiding what we feel slowly disconnects us from ourselves
For a long time, I thought I was good at handling my emotions. I wasn’t the kind of person who cried easily or got overwhelmed in public. I could keep it together. But what I didn’t realise back then is that keeping it together and not feeling are two very different things. And one of them comes at a high cost.
The survival skill that turns into a habit
A lot of us learn to suppress our emotions early on. Maybe it was about being the strong one in the family. Maybe there wasn’t space for our sadness or fear. Maybe someone taught us, directly or not, that feeling too much was a weakness. So we learn to hold it in. We put things in little boxes inside ourselves and stack them up in some emotional attic where we don’t have to look at them again. At least, that’s what we think.
But nothing stays hidden forever. At some point, the boxes start to shake. The attic door creaks open. And things we thought we’d buried deep start to show up in ways we didn’t expect. Sometimes in anxiety. Sometimes in burnout. Sometimes in that strange emptiness we can’t explain.
You can’t choose which emotions to numb
One of the hardest things to accept is that when you numb pain, you also numb joy. It doesn’t work like a filter where you can just block the bad stuff. When you stop yourself from feeling fear, sadness, disappointment, you also dull the parts of you that feel excitement, love, and connection. It’s like turning the volume down on your whole life.
And you don’t even notice it at first. You think you’re just busy or tired. You go through your days on autopilot, checking things off a list. You smile when you’re supposed to. You say you’re fine even when you’re not. And you convince yourself this is what adulthood looks like. But deep down, there’s a gap between what you live and what you actually feel.
The body keeps score, even when the mind forgets
It’s wild how the body stores what the mind tries to ignore. You might feel it as tension in your chest, a knot in your stomach, or that pressure behind your eyes that never fully goes away. Suppressed emotions don’t just disappear. They sit inside, waiting for a moment to break through.
I remember watching a scene from a show once that hit too close to home, and I just started crying out of nowhere. Not because of the show. But because I hadn’t given myself space to cry about everything else. That’s when it clicked: the pain was still there. It just hadn’t been given permission to exist.
Letting yourself feel doesn’t make you weak
There’s this idea floating around that feeling deeply makes you fragile. But the truth is, feeling is part of healing. It’s not about falling apart every time something hard happens. It’s about not abandoning yourself when it does.
Letting yourself cry, vent, journal, or even just sit in silence with what you feel can be a form of self-respect. You’re telling yourself, “What I’m going through matters.” And when you give your emotions that kind of space, they stop screaming for attention in other ways. You get to move through them, instead of dragging them with you.
Small steps back to yourself
No one’s asking you to feel everything all at once. That would be too much. But maybe it starts with noticing when you say “I’m fine” and you’re really not. Maybe it’s asking yourself what you’re actually feeling, even if you don’t have the words. Maybe it’s choosing to sit with the discomfort instead of distracting yourself again.
We all carry things we didn’t get to feel at the time. But it’s never too late to let yourself catch up. To pause, to breathe, and to start reconnecting with what’s been waiting for you beneath the surface.