Can We Box Up Our Worries?
My former therapist might have been onto something
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Picture this:
I’m 27 and sobbing in my therapist’s office. Her name is Louise and her office is on the fourth floor of a huge old building in Downtown LA, a few blocks from where I need to be at work in an hour and fifteen minutes. The office’s huge wooden door with a frosted window, reminiscent of a noir detective film, provides a vintage drama to my 8am Tuesday appointments. When I push through the door, there’s a literal weight to entering Louise’s plain little room. It feels important. It feels like the end of the world.
Louise should be wearing a trench coat, leaning on a desk, smoking a cigarette; the blinds sending horizontal shadows across her face. But instead, she sits across from me with a legal pad and extra box of tissues.
She’s from Argentina and moves like a ballerina, long arms gracefully placing the box on the table between us.
”Where do you feel the emotion in your body?” she asks.
I blow my nose. “In my tear ducts,” I say.
She doesn’t laugh. In our six months together, I think I’ve made her laugh once. And it very well could’ve been a little cough and not a laugh at all.
”Okay, just notice that,” she coos. Louise should record audiobooks. Her voice is so steady. “Are you noticing?”
I nod. My nose is running straight into my open mouth. I can’t help but notice.
”Notice what color your emotion is, what shape. How big is it? What weight is it?” she continues. We do this exercise a lot. I know it by heart.
”Now, put that emotion in a box.”
This part always trips me up, because my emotions feel like clouds, sometimes calmly floating by, sometimes rumbling through, kicking up enough electricity to start a forest fire. But I nod anyway. It’s my brain, I can put a cloud in a box if I want to.
”Now imagine a space, out of the way, where you can leave the box. It’s safe here, and you can come back to it when you have the time to process it.”
She means that according to her clock, I only have an hour to get cleaned up, find a better parking spot, and put on eyeliner before work. It’s also a gentle code for, “my next appointment is here.”
I close the box in my mind and put it away. I’m still 15 minutes late for work.
Five years later, everything is different.
New city, new worries, new therapist. I sit on a couch in my small apartment in Portland, Oregon with the one constant in my adult life: Mister the cat. He stands on the keyboard of my laptop as Jennifer, the aforementioned new therapist, leads a group therapy meeting on self compassion. She recommended I join the 8-week program after I called myself a frickin idiot during a one-on-one session. Her gravelly voice is the opposite of soothing, but I make her laugh all the time.
”Imagine a safe space,” she says.
I resist rolling my eyes, because to me no space is safe. When I conjure up happy places like my childhood bedroom or a California beach or my grandma’s backyard, my heart crumples with the knowledge that those places are transitory. They aren’t safe because even the one’s I can still visit will be gone someday. My brain learned the hard way that I can lose everything I love and it won’t let me forget it.
”Take your time,” Jennifer says, probably noticing my eyebrows are furrowed in frustration.
Ugh, I’m such a frickin idiot. Oh wait, that’s the opposite of what I’m supposed to be doing. There, there. You … not … frickin idiot.
”The space you choose shouldn’t have any emotion attached to it.”
It hits me. In the long hallway of my brain, memories and people crossing through like Scooby Doo and his gang in and out of various doors, I make my way to the pile of boxes Louise helped me stash half a decade ago.
I’m in a kitchen.
It’s a kitchen in Los Feliz, a neighborhood nestled up against the mountains where there’s a great view of the Hollywood sign. It’s a kitchen I’ll never see again, not because of my own decisions, but because the people I was housesitting for sold it. As far as its impermanence, I’m in the clear, free of guilt.
The floors are black and white, like a cute diner, and the counter tops are baby pink tile. Each of the white wooden cabinets are clipped by an earthquake-safe latch, so I have to squeeze my fingers in to the corners to open them. The round scent of 50’s LA home lingers happily inside each one. I’m three freeways from the ocean, but I can smell the swell of saltiness in the woodwork, comforting and (for a reason I can’t explain) protective.
Crisp, golden California sun, an entity that I haven’t been able to explain properly to people who insist they “like the seasons” in the Pacific Northwest, streams through a huge window over the sink. I won’t have to turn on any of the lights until 7:30, and even then, the kitchen will glow a lush orange until it’s completely dark. Outside the window, huge green Monstera leaves brush against a light breeze.
Someone in the family who lives here must’ve worked in a restaurant. There’s a professional espresso machine and a tiny bowl for cooking salt and a special plate to put your spoon on while you’re cooking. There’s a pan for everything, and all of the pots have matching tops. A slim bottle of olive oil has a fancy silver spout instead of a twist top. There’s so much wine. And so much cheese. To me, a daring cheese purchase would be something like extra sharp cheddar, but every drawer in the fridge contains little dairy surprises with serious French names, veins of blue, and whiffs of sweet sourness. This is a grown up kitchen for people with grown up money. And grown up sensibilities. Priorities. Taste.
I feel a familiar longing that I’ve batted around since high school. I don’t just want to be an adult. I want to be the right kind of adult.
It doesn’t matter here in this pink-tiled kitchen. All the gadgets have a place. The silverware matches and the fridge is full. It’s like waking up in the best possible Freaky Friday situation.
This is where I went when Louise guided me through putting away my boxed up emotions. In my mind’s eye, completely ignoring whatever exercise Jennifer is trying to do in 2022, I open the fridge. The cheese is still there, but so are all the boxes — shoeboxes, all the same size so they stack perfectly on top of one another. They’re all unmarked cardboard, but I remember what’s inside of each one: fear of failure, loneliness, a deadline for a video that’s been forgotten longer than it took to make …
I slide one of the shoeboxes out of the fridge and open it slowly. It’s empty. I shake another. There’s nothing inside.
The clouds of emotion have dissipated, cycled back up into the ether. They’re gone. It’s a relief — those mini storms can’t bother me anymore — but there’s also a pang of … nostalgia? Why would I miss the worries I squirreled away during my 8am therapy appointments five years ago?
Maybe they seem easier to solve. I could handle them a heck of a lot better now, because, well, I’ve already handled them. The twinge of hurt creeps up, similar to the one I feel standing in my childhood bedroom, knowing someday I’ll have to pack up all the beautiful books nestled in beautiful shelves. Those Big Problems felt like forever. But they were as fleeting as anything else.
Jennifer congratulates the self compassion group on a great session and reminds us that our homework for the week is to hug ourselves whenever the urge to talk shit surfaces.
I drink a glass of water. I bought a dozen Mason jars when I moved, even though I could’ve emptied a single jar of spaghetti sauce and used that.
I smooth out my yoga mat, also “new” in the sense that it never lived with me in Los Angeles or Santa Fe.
Mister rubs his perfect little face into my hand, demanding pets. I scratch under his chin, rub each of his ears, until he gets impatient with me and moves on with the rest of his night.
The Sob Blog is possible because of viewers like you. Consider supporting Christina and Mister through a paid subscription. Not for you? No worries! You can still access our archive of free posts here.
All of this imagery is beautiful and vulnerable. Thanks for writing this, it made me think about my own stashed boxes, and knowing their contents might work themselves out is comforting. Love, people who insist they “like the seasons” in the Pacific Northwest.