When Expression Has Nowhere To Go, It Comes Out Sideways
Dear friend,
This week has been heavy.
Many of us are watching what’s unfolding in our cities, our systems, and our communities and feeling it land in the body before we have words for it — grief, anger, fear, exhaustion, confusion.
Not everyone knows how to name what they’re feeling. Only that something feels deeply off. When moments like this arise, we’re often told there are only either/or options:
Speak louder or stay quiet.
Protest or disengage.
Pick a side or look away.
But beneath all of that lives a more essential question — one we rarely pause long enough to ask:
What happens to a society when people no longer have the internal capacity to be with pain, difference, and fear without turning it into control?
What we are witnessing right now is not simply disagreement or unrest. It is what happens when distress has nowhere healthy to go.
When fear cannot be felt, it seeks power.
When pain cannot be expressed, it looks for dominance.
When grief is not metabolized, it hardens into righteousness.
This isn’t new. It shows up everywhere — in families, in schools, in workplaces, in governments, in religious systems.
When expression is suppressed long enough, it doesn’t disappear. It comes out sideways.
And the tragedy is this: Most people are not trying to harm.
They are trying to regulate. But regulation without capacity becomes control. Protection without contact becomes violence.
We talk a great deal about skill in this culture — better systems, better strategies, better enforcement, better answers. And skill matters. It always has.
But skill without capacity is dangerous.
Capacity is what allows us to stay with discomfort without overriding others.
Capacity is what lets us hold multiple truths without collapsing or dominating. Capacity is what allows difference to exist without becoming a threat.
And capacity is not built through force.
It is built through expression.
Not just words — though words matter. Expression is movement. Expression is sound. Expression is rhythm, creation, release.
Expression is allowing what has gone in to move through instead of staying lodged deep inside.
This is why art has always been subversive. Why music regulates what speeches cannot. Why movement, making, building, dancing, singing, writing, shaping — all of it — has been essential to human survival.
When societies defund expression and prioritize control, they don’t create order. They create pressure. And pressure always finds a way out.
When expression isn’t given a channel, it becomes a weapon — against self, against others, against truth.
I want to be clear: this is not about being louder or more correct. It is about becoming more available — to ourselves first.
Because when we do not have the capacity to be with our own fear, grief, or anger, we will try to regulate it out of someone else.
And when we do have capacity — when we know how to let sensation move, when we know how to express without dominating — something shifts:
We can respond instead of react. We can stay instead of harden. We can act without losing our humanity.
This is not weakness.
This is the most essential form of courage.
The kind that says:
I will not disappear.
I will not dominate.
I will not look away.
I will stay human — even here.
From my heart to yours,
Practice Postscript
Where the letter stops being read and starts being lived.
This week’s practice is not about fixing what you feel.
It’s about giving it somewhere to go.
The Practice: Follow the Channel
Once this week, choose one form of expression — not to perform, not to produce, not to explain — but to release. This is not about words unless words are what your body wants. Let the body choose:
Movement without choreography
Sound without lyrics
Writing without editing
Making without meaning
Breath with shape
Hands in dirt, clay, fabric, paint, wood, color
Walking without destination
Set your phone timer for 10–15 minutes, if helpful.
Your only responsibility is this:
Let what’s been held find a channel out.
No interpretation. No analysis. No audience.
When the time ends, place a hand on your body and ask quietly: What moved that hadn’t been able to before?
That’s capacity building.
This is how pressure becomes presence. This is how pain becomes information instead of weapon. This is how the mechanism begins to change — one regulated body at a time. By mechanism, I’m naming the pattern we live inside of — the way unexpressed fear and pain move through bodies, relationships, and systems when there is no safe place for them to go.
You don’t need to do this perfectly.
You only need to let something move.
Capacity is built — not forced.
Most of us don’t need to push harder.
We need intentional pauses where our system can recalibrate, integrate, and listen.
The Seasonal Nudge is a quarterly clarity session designed to help you stay in relationship with yourself as life changes — not just once, but across the year.
Four sessions. Four seasons.
A grounded way to build capacity rather than override it.
If you’re ready to meet your life with more steadiness, truth, and internal trust, you’re welcome here.
