If there hadn’t been so many people on the escalator with me, I would have cursed the billboard out loud. I was in the Dulles airport, my home away from home back when my corporate job sent me on business trips every week or two.

Each time on my way to the United terminal, I’d go past the same advertisement — a giant electronic rectangle filling the escalator stairwell. I’d stare at it, lips pursed, fingers death gripping my roller bag’s handle, enduring the glacial ride to the C gates.

It featured a Dad in a loose blue hoodie, standing behind his tween son, arm draped lovingly over his shoulder. He was kissing him on the head, while Mom smiled glowingly a few paces back. 

I hated that ad.

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Every week I would burn with anger over the two-parent family I no longer had. Over a son who forever lost a dad to drape an arm around him. To kiss him on the head. 

Then… time passed. I’d have a few weeks, maybe a month, maybe two, away from this fake family rubbing my face in all the things missing from my life. During my next C terminal escalator ride, staring up at it, I felt a different emotion. No more fiery hatred. This time, verge-of-tears sadness… 

More time passed.

The sadness lost its intensity. Sharp pain turned to dull ache. I could look at it without reaching for my tissues or my foulest curse words.

I started to see the ad for what it was. Not an indictment of my life, not a big mean finger pressing a tender bruise over and over again. Just pixels on a giant screen, advertising a health insurance company.

The ad didn’t change. I did.

That’s what happens when we let our emotions run their course. 

When we let them be what they are… without interfering. 

But here’s what we often do instead: prevent our emotions from ever arriving at the starting line. We try to jam them into a locker so they never even see the inside of the arena. So they cannot get out of the gate.

An emotion stuffed in a locker is an emotion that will never change. Or go away.

We love the stuff-down tactic for its perceived finality. “I’ve hand jammed this thing so far down it will never arise again! Hah hah! Nothing to see here!”

But we all know suppression is b******t. We are trading pain in the now for pain in the future. We’re setting ourselves up to spend months, maybe years trying to avoid what we’ve stuffed down. This makes our lives smaller. This makes us feel less free. 

For better or worse, my catastrophe was so giant that all my carefully honed suppression mechanisms were flooded and unusable. So feelings came whether I wanted them to or not. And I went through them all. 

Thank God.

Were they messy and ugly and painful and irrational? You bet. I mean, what’s the point of getting angry at a billboard? Shouting at the life insurance customer service rep? Sobbing in the Bed Bath and Beyond pillow aisle?

Yet all the mess is part of the process. It’s where the action is. It’s what creates the change. Not just in your emotions. In you.

I can’t say I understand the mechanism for how this actually works. 

All I know is it’s essential. It’s the root of my power: knowing my emotions will evolve if I let them flow.

I was back at Dulles last week, but everything felt different. I have traded my blazer for a bomber jacket, my corporate laptop for an iPad and too many books.

And that gut-punch ad? It’s been replaced by a cloud computing pitch. But as I rode the escalator, I could still see that dad and son in my mind’s eye. And what I felt surprised me:

Wistfulness.

Wistfulness for those dad-hugging, tween-raising years in our life. Wistfulness for who we were as a family. Wistfulness for what was lost. Though it was related to sadness, it was warmer. It didn’t feel like emptiness, it felt like a glow.

And oddly, that wistfulness was a form of consolation.

I’d have nothing to long for if I had not had something amazing in the first place. 

Looking back, I see how the rage, sadness, curse words, and pillow shopping/sobbing sprees were all necessary steps along the way to this warm wistful glow. 

I couldn’t skip ahead.

When we find ourselves healing from a loss, we have to move forward. Not just physically, but emotionally. We have to let our emotions do what they’ve come to do — be fully felt. Otherwise by trying to escape the pain we’ll be trapped in the pain. We’ll never know what its like to look back and say,

“Damn, that hurt like hell. But finally I can feel more than pain — I can feel all the good that came first.”

Tomorrow I may feel completely differently, but today I think I can say, I’ve made it to the other side.

One feeling at a time,

Sue

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