I’d Like to Delegate My Feelings

There was a stretch this summer where I didn’t open my email for ten days.

Not a vacation. Not some noble boundary. I looked at the icon, felt my chest go tight, and decided it was a tomorrow problem. Ten times in a row.

I’d like to be clear that I don’t run a hedge fund. It was newsletters. I was hiding from newsletters.

Here’s what the ten days were actually about.

We lost my father-in-law suddenly. Not long after, a friend I’d known since childhood. Somewhere in there I got deep enough into writing my book that I pried up floorboards I’d nailed down neatly for a reason.

So I built a backyard.

Pool, patio, gravel, fence, the whole operation. I hauled rock in ninety degrees. I picked up shifts I did not need to pick up.

This is what I do. Things get heavy, I go inward, I get very busy. Busy has a to-do list. Quiet has feelings in it. Not a hard call.

And listen, the backyard is gorgeous. That’s the annoying part. I have real output to show for a season of not dealing with anything.

I should mention here that I’ve built an entire body of work on emotional regulation. Nervous system capacity. Pressure stability. Recovery and renewal. People pay me to explain this. I have it up, down, left, right, backward and forward, and I cannot get myself to sit in a chair for ten minutes and feel one thing on purpose.

I’ve decided this makes me better at teaching it. Which is either genuine insight or the most convenient rationalization I’ve ever produced. Jury’s out.

Then I started listening to How to ADHD, because when I’m falling apart my instinct is to reach for a book instead of a person. There’s a chapter about learning to feel things. Turns out that going out of your way to avoid emotion is a hallmark trait. Brains like mine got hit early and hard with feelings that were too big and too fast to do anything useful with, so instead of building a system to process them, we built one to not be in the room when they land.

I sat with that a while. Thirty-odd years of behavior clicking into a shape.

Then I noticed how good it felt, and got suspicious. Because that’s a hell of a permission slip. It’s not a flaw, it’s a feature. Cool. Great. I could ride that for another decade.

Now for the funny part.

Last summer, at a crossroads, I went and found a total stranger. That was the point — an executive coach with no stake in my life, no connection to anyone I know, nobody’s aunt, nobody’s coworker. Pure unbiased outside opinion. She asked me what item I’d be in someone’s glove compartment. I said the mini flashlight that barely works. Blinks more than it beams, but comes through.

This spring I hit another wall. So I reached out. To her. The stranger.

Who is, at this point, categorically not a stranger, which means the entire reason I picked her no longer applies, and I did it anyway because she was the one who worked.

And the timing on this is the part that gets me. I called her not long after my book coach told me that when the words won’t come out on paper, eventually it has to go to a human. Which I immediately translated as you need a therapist.

So I called a coach.

A therapist would make me sit in it. A coach might just tell me the answer. I understood the difference perfectly and picked accordingly.

What I wanted — and I want to be precise, because I think the precision is the problem — was for someone to take the feelings off my hands, run them through some kind of process, and give them back to me sorted. Labeled. In a folder. Preferably with a recommendation on page one and an implementation timeline on page two.

I have a whole skill set for that. Give me a P&L, a staffing model, a compliance problem, a family in crisis at two in the morning, and I will walk in and sort it out. That’s the job. That’s been the job for years.

So it is genuinely galling that the one situation I cannot delegate, escalate, restructure, or hand off to a qualified party is the one happening inside my own chest.

I keep looking for the org chart. There isn’t one. It’s just me in here.

She asked me what book my life would be. The Mountain Is You. Instantly. No thinking about it.

So: two ridiculous questions, a year apart, nothing in common, same answer both times. I’m the thing in my own way.

I want to be honest about where that leaves me, because I think the tidy version would be a lie. I am genuinely somewhere different than I was a year ago. Completely re-decorated house, different work, different griefs, more clarity than I’ve ever had about why I do what I do.

And I am running the exact same play.

Clarity did not fix it. That’s the thing nobody tells you. You can understand your own machinery in fine detail and still watch it run.

My book coach was right, and I knew it when she said it. Some things don’t come out on paper.

I’ve got a year of paper on this now.

Hasn’t moved an inch.

— Katie