I keep my feelings in a box
"Without strong memories, it’s easy to feel disconnected from who I am, where I’ve been, and who I’ve loved."
I keep my feelings in a big box in my kitchen cupboard. It’s a ritual I’ve held onto since I was a little girl, and by now, I'm on box number five. The first four are stowed in the attic.
Last week I went into the kitchen cupboard to grab wrapping paper. Four hours later I found myself sitting cross-legged on the kitchen floor surrounded by a sea of photographs, postcards, letters, the medal I won at sports day in 2008, a paper chef’s hat I made with my first boyfriend while goofing around in the kitchen, birthday invitations, wedding announcements, photos of friends’ first-borns.
All of a sudden, I was sitting in feelings.
A feeling is an "emotional state or reaction." It fascinates me that feelings can exist even if we're unaware of them. I can be caught in an emotional state without consciously knowing it.
The strange familiarity of not knowing my feelings is more like home to me than actually feeling them. Maybe, on some level, I’ve always sensed them, but I felt unprepared to experience them directly. Or maybe I learned that any feeling besides "fine" was somehow dangerous or wrong, and so I refused to acknowledge them. Perhaps I could sense something—an undefined weight within me—but I didn’t know how to name it, and so I simply didn’t try.
Whatever the reason, my feelings ended up in boxes. Pushed to the backs of cupboards, tucked away out of sight. They’re stored in the energy of the objects I collect—too frightening to fully experience and too precious to release. So they sit, suspended in time, waiting in their boxes until I stumble upon them again.
About once a year, while looking for something practical like wrapping paper or a notebook, I find myself peeking inside one of these boxes, unlocking that world of feelings I’ve tucked away. A peek becomes a look, a look becomes a search, and a search turns into a mission to feel.
But when we don’t process emotions as they happen, can we truly revisit them? Without experiencing them, how do we know what they were, build our stories, or shape an emotional identity? When I open these treasure troves I don’t revisit specific memories so much as unleashing a rush of tangled emotions. Often, there’s a mix of nostalgia and sadness, and it’s normal for me to look back at photos and and trinkets and start crying without understanding why.
Everything I keep has sentimental value, whether it’s a joyful memento or a token from more complicated times. The words, photos, smells, textures, sounds, and tastes in these boxes are physical traces of places I’ve been, people I’ve known, and moments I’ve lived.
Without strong memories, it’s easy to feel disconnected from who I am, where I’ve been, and who I’ve loved. But my boxes are my external hard drive—their contents form the worlds I’ve been a part of, that might otherwise slip away.
Hello Charlie. Thank you for this and your previous postings and YouTube videos, which I’ve always found very helpful. Like you have had difficulties with feelings and I’m pretty sure I have Alexithymia. You might be interested in these recent interviews about my late autism diagnosis.
'I felt broken until my autism diagnosis at 70' - BBC Wales, 9 November 2024
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy87542l14ro
‘Former Welsh Minister, 72, reveals he's been diagnosed as autistic’ - Nation.Cymru, 17 October 2024 - https://nation.cymru/news/former-welsh-minister-72-reveals-hes-been-diagnosed-as-autistic/
Once again I feel as though you've spoken straight from my brain/heart, Charlie!!
I have always had a very strong and particular affinity for *things* (especially mementos and nostalgia), and I always felt that physical items felt filled with meaning and emotion and memories—*things*, that to other people might just be an inanimate object, were always more to me; they represented stories and histories; even if those stories weren't mine, or were even unknown to me (who made it? Who previously owned it? How did they feel about it?) I somehow feel them hiding in the item like secrets...
It took me a long time to realise the deeper significance of this for myself. I spent a long time carrying shame about being called 'materialistic', 'sentimental' (could never understand why this one in particular was negative?!), and 'boarderline hoarder'. And I think that shame stopped me from investigating further. I would just quietly keep my collections of sentimental items, sometimes unexpectedly taking them all out (as you've said—usually when looking for something specific and mundane) and spontaneously soaking myself in the memories and feelings before putting it all away again.
It was relatively recently (sometime in the past 5 or so years) that I realised not only do these precious items hold feelings and memories for me, in many ways they *are* my memories. They act as a kind of 'key' to unlocking whatever moment or feeling from my past they associate with—holding and looking at each item takes me right back into my past self and I can feel it like I'm there. But in many—most—cases, I can't seem to access the memories without the key. My memory is full of holes and my emotions are generally kept behind a wall, and apart from those times when I'm walking down memory lane with my little bundle of keys, I can't seem to access those feelings/memories at all.