Goodbye 2025. Hello, Feelings.

I think about my mom and dad a lot. I always have, but now, since I can’t call them or go see them, the thoughts feel rooted in stunned longing instead of judgmental push/pull attachment.

I had known it was going to be tough (and it was) when my mom died, but I didn’t think my dad’s death would hit me that hard. I loved him, but I expected to feel both sad and free when he was gone. I thought in many ways it would be a relief, that I would finally be able to drop the adoption narrative and be me.

The word devastated had not occurred to me. If someone had told me I’d live in a state of shock for well over a year, I would have looked over my shoulder to see to whom they spoke.

I don’t much like who I am without my parents around, it turns out. 

It wasn’t that I liked myself better when they were alive, but they loved me so much I could rely on their feelings where mine were lacking. It seems my light came from the light they shone in my direction. When my mom was gone, my dad had carried enough light for them both, and so I had driven back across the country when he started to get old and not well because I wanted to have as much time in that light as possible. The story I told myself was that my dad needed me. I did not think much about the thought that I needed him.

At least once a week I would made the 90-minute drive from Massachusetts to New Hampshire to see him. I’d have loving feelings the whole way there, happy to be driving to see my dad, happy to think about stopping at Dunkin’ to get him a coffee, thoughts and memories of driving this route with my daughter from Logan airpor to visit her grandparents. I’d park, happy, sign in at the front desk, happy, knock at my dad’s door, happy, and then he would open the door and there would be that pause of awkwardness we always had. How do we hug? Why does this feel weird? Why was I suddenly so desperate to get back on the road? “I can only stay a few minutes,” I’d say, time and time again. “But I’m so happy to see you.”

When a bird goes into flight, it needs something to push off on, a stick, the ground, your finger. If you drop your finger as the birth gathers itself, it won’t be able to spring up and away.

I think my parents were my thing to press against so I could fly. I am not you, I could say, flying away, only to come back later that day or week or year because I had never learned to trust that when they were no longer in sight they were still around.

But now they have flown away, and once again, after all these decades, I am an orphan. I imagine I’ve come full circle, experiencing emotions that I might have felt those first ten weeks of my life when I was without a mother or father but had no words to talk about it, only a brain and a nervous system to record what was happening somewhere in parts of me I did not seem able access on my own.

Until now.

What is happening? I don’t feel safe. Red alert red alert red alert! I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be here.

What if unprocessed feelings are like unpaid bills? Even when they get buried under lots of stuff, they don’t go anywhere. They just get bigger. What if I needed to get to the age I am now with the tools I have acquired in order to sit still long enough and with enough acceptance to pay them their due?

The body keeps the score, is that not right?

I have the sense that 2026 is going to be the year, for many people, about feelings.

So many things have put our country, this world, into states of shock of chaos, and so many of us have operated on ultra-function mode just to make it through the days without becoming overwhelmed by the news or the cost of food or our own thoughts.

Trump and his followers have made it clear what the world looks like when we put the emphasis on being number one, on having the most toys, the biggest house, the most girls. Where can we possibly go from here? 

What do I do with the feelings that are in my system about all these people unfairly sent away, imprisoned, killed, brutalized? How can I remain humane and still function?

I think we have so much to learn about feelings, how to feel. There is a life coach, Joe Hudson, I have watched become explosively popular this year on Youtube. One of his premises is that it is the feelings we avoid that run our lives.  

I believe this.

Baby me did not have the physical or mental tools to process separation trauma as an infant, so that stuff got stuffed somewhere in me, leaving me often reactive, moody, and confused even six decades later.

I’m learning about feelings. They are fascinating. If you sit down with one and pay attention to it, it’s actually not that big a deal. The next time you have one that feels overwhelming, sit with it and imagine you are describing the sensations to a martian so they could have the same experience My chest is tight. My abdomen feels empty. I am light-headed. I think it’s the stories that can turn feelings a nightmare. I am not safe. This is going to last forever. I am not a good person. I am going to die.

As someone who has taken her stories seriously her own life in order to deal, in part, with feelings that felt too dangerous to feel, this all was news to me. Stories are words in my head? Feelings pass?

Martha Beck said it’s not so much about whether a story is true but whether it is helpful. I came to Provincetown to hunker down over the winter and pick through my stories to see which ones are helpful and which ones I could question. This is not easy work. I created stories for good reasons, and so dismantling them can feel like slow surgery. 

When you hear about people changing their lives or constructing a new sense of self, there’s something Hollywood about it, a good soundtrack, inspiring. But as someone who feels in the middle of this process, I would argue it’s more like childbirth. Which, as a person who wanted to give up in the middle of a hard birth because I was sure it was going to kill me, is not Hollywood with an upbeat soundtrack. It’s more like eating a mountain with your own damn mouth.

I came to this pretty, quiet house with its big leather couch and its fireplace to feel. I needed to create a quiet nest where I could believe I was safe enough to relax and soften in order to let what I held deep inside of me bubble up to the surface. It’s like I’m on a super-slow-motion MDMA trip.

 My hope is that if I go through this process and write about it, maybe other people won’t feel so alone. Maybe company and community can make the process a little easier. A little, dare I say it, even more fun?

Because I have had fun here. Oh, the fun and delight in chasing your own dreams even when they are strange and hard to describe to yourself and others. This morning after getting coffee, I drove past a section of the Cape Cod National Seashore. Bird sat shotgun on the console, his weight partly leaning against my arm. He looked forward excitedly, like he was piloting the ship of us, as did I.

Two pilots, watching the world unfold into wildly choppy water, high winds, and blue sky.

 What I love about not being in college anymore is that I can write essays without conclusions. Remember being taught that the end should somehow loop back to the beginning? That makes sense to me, but it also seems really stupid. It’s like hiking Mount Everest and being photographed and seeing you look exactly the same as the photo they took of you at base camp.

Isn’t the point of life to change? If you don’t look beaten-up and weathered at the top, what actually happened? If you don’t look like you are feeling the joy of accomplishment or, if you had to turn around 250 yards from the summit, the agony of defeat, what was the point?