I’m Not Crazy. I’m Emotionally Catching Up to My Life.

Since I stopped drinking, my past has been showing up in my dreams.

Not as memories. As feelings.

I wake up carrying emotions that don’t belong to my present life. Feelings tied to people I haven’t seen in decades. Versions of myself I barely recognize. The teenager who cried alone. The young woman who drank to feel confident. The version of me who was rejected. The version of me who gave too much. The version of me who didn’t know how to protect herself.

For a while, I thought something was wrong with me.

Why now? Why after all this time?

The answer, I’m learning, is both simple and uncomfortable:

I never actually learned how to deal with my emotions. I only learned how to delay them.

I grew up believing emotions were a weakness. In my home, they weren’t something you talked about. Showing them made you “difficult.” Made you seem like you couldn’t handle things. And I was the emotional one. The one who felt deeply but didn’t know what to do with those feelings.

I don’t blame my parents. They grew up the same way. They didn’t have the tools, so they couldn’t pass them down.

As a teenager, I didn’t talk to anyone about what I was feeling. Maybe a friend occasionally. But mostly, I cried, mostly alone. A lot.

I didn’t know how to process emotions. I only knew how to carry them.

High school is also when alcohol entered the picture.

At the time, it didn’t feel dangerous. It felt like relief.

Alcohol gave me confidence. It gave me permission not to care so much. It quieted the emotional noise inside me. It made me feel normal.

When I moved to DC after college and didn’t know anyone, I started drinking alone. It didn’t feel abnormal. It felt like survival.

Over time, I drank through everything. Not just loneliness, rejection, and disappointment, but uncertainty. Even happiness.

The more I drank, the more disconnected I became from myself.

I truly disliked who I was. I felt lost.

Alcohol didn’t fix anything. It just made it easier not to feel anything fully.

It paused my emotional development.

When I stopped drinking, I expected clarity. And I got it. What I didn’t expect was how emotionally immature I would feel. I had so much work to do.

Feelings I had buried for decades came back. Relationships I never properly grieved resurfaced. Boys and men who rejected me. Friends who abandoned me. Relationships I pushed hard on, hoping they would become something they were never going to be. And other emotions tied to deeply personal experiences I had never fully allowed myself to process.

I have had to accept that some people were never capable of supporting me in the way I needed, no matter how deeply I wanted them to.

And while that wasn’t the outcome I wanted, accepting it lifted something off of me. It removed the pressure. It removed the constant disappointment. It allowed me to let go.

Versions of myself from my early twenties have come crashing back into my mind. Moments where I put myself in danger. Moments where I gave too much. Moments where I disappointed others. Moments where I disappointed myself.

The dreams leave me with feelings that last well into the next day.

The hardest part has been having absolutely nothing to numb the noise.

For the first time in my life, I’ve had to sit with sadness. Loneliness. Anger. Discomfort.

Fully present.

When my grandmother passed away in December 2021. At that time, I was in my first long stretch of sobriety. I didn’t numb her death. I didn’t run from it.

I cried. I prayed. I let myself feel it.

And because I did, I was able to move through it.

I still miss her deeply. But her death doesn’t haunt me. It doesn’t show up unresolved. I know with certainty that if I had been drinking, it would be different. It would be another emotional loop left open.

That experience showed me something important.

Feelings that are allowed can finish.

For a long time, I thought something was wrong with me. Why was I still affected by things from so long ago?

Now I understand.

Those emotions didn’t disappear. They waited.

They waited until I was strong enough. Safe enough. Present enough to face them.

Alcohol kept me emotionally frozen.

I’ve grown more emotionally in the past two years than I did in most of my twenties and thirties combined.

I understand now that I was never “too emotional.” I was someone who felt deeply and was never taught how to move through those feelings.

So they stayed.

Now I’m learning that emotions aren’t permanent. They move when you let them.

We are not meant to be happy all the time. We are meant to feel everything.

We are not meant to be loved and understood by everyone. We are meant to accept people for who they are and move toward the ones who see us clearly and accept and love what they see.

We are not meant to force relationships that were never ours to keep.

And we are not meant to carry emotions forever.

I don’t think these feelings are showing up now to hurt me. I think they are showing up to complete something.

I believe God is preparing me for a life that feels different than the one I’ve always known. A life with more peace. More ease. Less fear of my own inner world.

He is teaching me that I am safe now. That I don’t need to run. That I can sit with discomfort and trust that it will pass.

That feelings are not something to escape, but something to move through.

And that learning this isn’t just for me. It’s for my children.

So they never grow up believing emotions are something to fear. So they never feel like they have to numb themselves to survive themselves. So they can trust their emotions instead of running from them.

For the first time in my life, I don’t feel stuck inside my emotions. I feel capable of moving through them.

Alcohol was keeping me stuck. Never fully okay. Never fully present.

In allowing myself to feel, I’ve found something I never had before.

Peace.

Not because I don’t feel pain. But because I’m no longer afraid of it.

I’m not crazy.

I’m emotionally catching up to my life.

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