For as long as I can remember, I’ve had deep feelings. Ocean-deep. The kind that move in instead of passing through, and rearrange the furniture.
I tried plenty of ways to deal with them over the years. I ignored them. I stayed busy. I told everyone I was fine.
But mostly, I thought. I sat down with each one and took it apart: why it showed up, what it meant, what I was supposed to learn from it, and what I needed to do so it would never happen again.
I thought that was emotional maturity. Last month, at 41, I finally realized I had spent most of my life trying to solve things that never had a solution.
My sister got the attention, and I got explanations
I grew up in a house that was mostly fine. Two parents, a split-level at the end of a cul-de-sac, a dog who slept in my bed. And one person taking up most of the emotional oxygen.
That was my sister, three years older and the rebel of the family. She came home after curfew, brought home Ds, and argued about everything. Whatever rule my parents set, she seemed determined to make it the next one she broke.
I had a lot of feelings about all of it. I was angry at her for upsetting them. I was jealous of how much attention she got, even when the attention was yelling.
Then came the guilt about being jealous, because anyone could see she was struggling too.
But there was already a difficult kid in the house, so I became the easy one. Nobody asked me to. I figured out that one less problem was useful, and I got very good at being it.
So when the front door opened at midnight and the voices started up in the kitchen, I stayed in my room with the lamp on and explained things to myself.
Of course I’m sad. They’re focused on her. I haven’t done anything wrong, so I shouldn’t need anything. This is why I’m upset. This is what has to happen for it to stop.
Before long, having an emotion and solving it had turned into the same activity. I didn’t know there was any other way to do it.
My overthinking looked a lot like ambition
The strange part is how well it worked for a long time. Nobody looks at a person who can explain every one of her own reactions and thinks she needs help.
At 29, I got my first bad performance review. The week before, my eyes had filled up in a meeting when a project I’d spent four months on got cut in front of the whole team. My manager used the word “reactive” twice.
I didn’t cry about the review. I went home, printed it out, and sat on the couch with a highlighter until every sentence had a mark on it. Next to “reactive,” I wrote fix.
By Sunday night, I had a three-page plan. Wait three seconds before responding in meetings. Write frustrations down instead of saying them. Keep my voice level. Every fix had a date next to it.
Eleven months later I got promoted, and my manager told me I was the most self-aware person on her team.
What she was praising, I think now, was that nobody could tell anymore when something got to me. At the time, I took it as proof the method worked.
So I did it everywhere. When a friend hurt me, I built the case: what she meant, whether I’d been unfair, whether I’d started it. After a fight with my partner, I went looking for the exact sentence where things had gone wrong.
From the outside, that kind of thinking can look responsible, even wise. Therapists who work with overthinking, high-achieving adults call it intellectualization: using analysis to create order and control around emotions that seem like too much.
That was exactly the deal I’d made with myself. As long as I could understand what happened, I could pretend I had some say in how much it hurt.
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Knowing why it hurt didn’t make it stop
Last month, my sister called on a Tuesday night. She’s 44 now, with two kids, a mortgage, and a husband who had just told her he wasn’t sure he wanted to stay.
She cried for an hour. I listened, and somewhere in the middle of it, I got up and pulled a legal pad out of the kitchen drawer.
By midnight I had two full pages. I’d written down everything she said about the last year, the money, the nights he’d been coming home later.
I had three theories about why he was pulling away and a list of things she could say to him that weekend.
Around 1 a.m., I started reading her the second theory. She let me get halfway through, and then she said, very quietly, “I don’t need you to figure it out. Can you just not hang up?”
So I didn’t. I stopped talking and listened to her cry and blow her nose, and at some point I put the pen down.
It was exactly what I’d wanted at 12, on the other side of my bedroom door, and I’d been handing her the opposite.
Nothing on those two pages was going to help. Her marriage wasn’t a problem I could solve. She was going to have to live through it, and the most I could do was stay on the other end of the phone while she did.
Then I looked at the legal pad and thought about how many of these I’d filled out for myself.
The friendship that ended even though I understood both sides perfectly. The person who never chose me as hard as I chose them, when no insight on earth was going to make that even.
I’d sat down with every one of them like a math problem. I figured if I found the right explanation, I’d eventually reach the part where the hurt stopped.
Understanding why something hurts and making it stop hurting are two different jobs.
I’d spent 30 years doing the first one and calling it the second.
Some feelings don’t come with a next move
The next morning, I woke up sick about my sister’s marriage and reached for the legal pad out of habit. I stopped myself and left it in the drawer. I felt terrible, and I let myself feel terrible without drawing up a plan for it.
Some days, getting through looks like almost nothing. There’s dinner. There’s going to work and answering emails like a normal person.
There’s sleeping badly for a few weeks and letting that be true without turning it into a referendum on every choice that got me here.
A few weeks after that call, I came across a study by a psychologist. She and her colleagues asked more than 1,000 adults how strongly they agreed with statements like I tell myself I shouldn’t be feeling the way that I’m feeling.
I’d been saying some version of that to myself since I was 12.
The people who didn’t judge their dark moods that way were doing better. In a later part of the research, the ones who let sadness, disappointment, and resentment run their course reported fewer mood-disorder symptoms six months later.
And there’s calling someone instead of sitting alone with the same thought for three more hours. That one is the hardest for me.
The kid in that bedroom learned that her sadness was hers to handle, and part of her remains pretty sure that asking for company is a kind of imposing.
My brain still wants the legal pad. It still wants causes and consequences and an action plan with dates next to it. But some nights the work is much smaller than that.
This happened. I hate that it happened. I’m still here.
Reflection still has a job to do
Thinking isn’t the enemy. Reflection has kept me from repeating the same mistakes.
It’s what helped me write the apology I owed my best friend after I snapped at her in front of her kids.
But the kind of thinking matters. Psychologists have found that going over the causes, consequences, and meanings of a hurt tends to make it bigger and harder to resolve.
The fix is to swap why for how: what happened, and what do I do next?
I don’t want to become somebody who feels everything and never acts. I’m learning there’s a difference between a problem that needs a decision and pain that needs time.
My sister’s marriage was the second kind. So was almost everything I’d ever brought to a legal pad.
Sometimes I think about the kid I was. She’s sitting on her bed while another argument about my sister happens downstairs, trying to make her own sadness reasonable enough that nobody will have to deal with it.
She got very good at it. Too good, probably.
I believed understanding my feelings was how I took care of them. Mostly, it was how I kept anyone else from having to.
Now, I’m trying to teach that girl something nobody knew she needed to hear back then: you don’t have to understand every feeling before you’re allowed to have it.
Most of what hurt me was never mine to solve, only mine to get through. I’m still here.
Editor’s Note: “As Told to Bolde” stories are inspired by reader submissions, interviews, and accounts shared with our editorial team. Details are often changed, combined, or dramatized, and our editors use AI tools in the writing process. See our Editorial Policy.
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