Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about sobriety, and as I’ve watched someone close to me hit their year mark, I’ve realized there’s something that isn’t talked about enough… Feelings.

Sobriety comes with a plethora of experiences. Everything feels like it’s happening for the first time. And honestly, a lot of them are happening for the first time. At least in a way that you’ll remember and experience completely.

Before you go sober, your entire existence is about escaping feelings. You numb them. Avoid them. Drink them away. They are never fully felt, and a lot of the time that’s intentional. The feelings you do have are either watered down or so extreme that they are later met with denial because you weren’t coherent during the experience.

Once you’re sober, there is nowhere to run.

Everything feels so overwhelming and awful, even the great feelings. They’re intense and huge, and it begins to feel like you’re losing all the control you’ve worked so hard to gain back into your life. And there are only two options when feelings come up: you can lean into them, face them, feel them, or you can build a wall and shut them out.

Building walls seems so much nicer. You can continue to avoid the intensity and gain a sense of control back. You don’t have to face anything hard. But it doesn’t take too long to realize that all you’ve done is push them under the surface to bubble up in other ways and in other areas of your life. And it’s stunting your growth and healing. Walls do an excellent job of keeping all those hard feelings at a distance, but they also keep all the beautiful feelings out too. Even worse, they close everything inside of you that you need to let out.

It’s the facing of feelings- the learning from them, growing from them- that builds our emotional intelligence. It helps us finally, probably for the first time, regulate our nervous systems. It’s what helps us navigate relationships and build beautiful lives that we won’t destroy with drinking or emotional ignorance. By facing them, we learn that we can do hard things and that helps build confidence for later obstacles and challenges that cross our path.  Because lord knows we’ll have plenty of those along the way.

Each obstacle becomes easier when you aren’t fighting yourself too. If your focus can just be on the problem at hand and not have to be spread thin by also trying to manage how much and what you feel, miracles happen. We all know the saying: “don’t sweat the small stuff, and it’s all small stuff.” When we don’t have to fight our feelings, problems become a whole lot smaller and easier to handle.

I wish I could say it was easy. It’s not. I hit 9 years of sobriety in September, and I still battle with this sometimes. Dealing with my feelings and all that entails is some of the hardest work I’ve done over these years. Even something as simple as identifying what it is I’m feeling to begin with has been challenging at times. Forget about figuring out what to do with the feeling once I figure out what it is. Even more, learning to stop trying to manage it and just letting the feelings come and go.

I had to learn that not every feeling has to be addressed and acknowledged. Oftentimes, I can let it arise, breathe into it, and let it go. It doesn’t have to be a big deal every single time I feel something. But I can’t even begin to say how long it took me to reach that point.

I had a lot of growing pains while I sat with feelings that were new to me. There have been many moments where I was overcome with an emotion, and I had to stop everything and ask myself out loud “what is going on within me? Why am I feeling this way?” There’s been a lot of trial and error in this realm for me. I have to spend a lot more time processing before I can talk to people about things. I have to sit with myself a lot more and work it out before I take it anywhere. That puts me in a lot of awkward situations, but it’s what has to be done to keep me ok.

We live in a world that too often paints feelings in a negative light rather than as what they are- a part of who we are as humans. Feelings aren’t bad, even the scariest of them, the saddest of them, the angriest of them. They are natural responses to what comes up in our environment and what we’ve been through. They are necessary. Anger lets us know when a boundary has been crossed. Fear lets us know where we can grow or that something isn’t right. Sadness lets us know we care. Each serves a purpose that we can learn and grow from. It’s what we do with them that matters and what can turn a very natural part of our humanity into a negative and even painful experience for ourselves and others.

And that’s what people are never taught. These are the things not talked about. This is the lesson learned in sobriety, often the hard way. This is why so many people fail at remaining sober. Facing a lifetime of demons that have been at bay for the duration of your addiction with no escape just becomes too much. How does someone prepare for the onslaught of emotions that seem to run rampant? How do we let ourselves let go of the control for a minute to sit in the discomfort and learn without trying to claw out of our own skin?

I think the decision to get sober is an easy one for most people. Not actually doing it but deciding to do it. After years of inflicting abuse on ourselves and the people around us- there’s rarely a question of whether it’s what’s best for us. Most of us look back at our lives and can’t imagine for a minute going back to that life. We can see all the pain and suffering behind every “fun” night, every smile in every picture, and we don’t want to keep doing that to ourselves. But I would also bet that every one of us will have or has had that moment when they are face to face with a huge emotion they’ve never had to fully feel before and wish with every fiber of their being they had a way to escape. And another battle begins.

That battle is perpetuated by this idea that we’re supposed to feel good all the time and that if we don’t, we’re failing somewhere. That fallacy is destroying people. Since becoming sober, I don’t think I’ve felt “fine” for a single day. I’ll say I’m fine because it’s easier than trying to explain that I run the gamut of emotions throughout every hour of the day now. And that’s a good thing! I’m not feeding all of them. I’m not reacting to all of them. I’m not expressing all of them. But I’m feeling them. Every day I feel and what a wonderful gift that is.