Brene Brown

You can’t selectively numb.

Those were the words that I heard during Brene Browns Ted-X talk 9 years ago that have stuck with me since.

I didn’t wake up that day, thinking I was going to learn some universal truth that I would fight against and try and prove wrong for almost a decade, but that is exactly what happened.

‘We cannot selectively numb emotions, when we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions.’

It felt so unfair, numbing is the way we get through hard things isn’t it? It’s our coping mechanism, its how we still manage to get up in the morning even after experiencing hardship, past trauma – how we push the feelings down and carry on with a smile painted on our faces?

I spent the next 9 years soaking in every word Brene uttered, I devoured her books, her talks, her time on Oprah. She was a very very wise women in my eyes – yet I would never believe that one sentence, because that was one step too far.

Until the numbing became too much. Until the numbing was nightly.

Last year, I realized that in order to be fully present for my daughter going through her own hell, meant that I had to be FULLY PRESENT. That I could not help her and then go drink wine to drown my own feelings and make it all go away for a few hours. Being present for her meant being there 24/7 and it meant that the last of my numbing mechanisms had to go.

Almost a year to the day, I gave up alcohol.

I signed up for a journey of feeling the feelings, rather than numbing them. If there was a feeling there, it was there for a reason and I needed to listen, observe, learn.

And a year into this journey, I can now testify that ‘you cannot selectively numb’

Numbing out the bad does indeed numb out the good, as much as we don’t want to hear it. The numbing has its place in our life, a fight or flight response to get us out of immediate danger, but after that, the job is ours to deal with the pain that makes us turn to coping mechanisms.

These coping mechanisms were never meant to be a part of your everyday life, the drinking, the overeating, the drugs, the shopping…they are all neon signs, highlighting that there is unhealed pain in you. And that unhealed pain does indeed metastasize into every other area of your life and dull everything.

Everything.

And so is it any real surprise that I chose Brene? The impact her work has had on me has left a permanent change, learned the hard way. The only surprising thing to me is that finishing the quilt and telling this story has coincided with my first anniversary of being alcohol free for one year!

And what an amazing journey it has been.

Quilt Details:

Size: 72″ x 96″

Number of blocks: 2,701

Number of colours: 10

Hours to make: Approx.100 hours (lots of unpicking and re-doing on this quilt!)