The Joy of Handling Your Shit

Let’s start here (I promise that I will explain this photo later in the essay!):

No one else is responsible for your emotions.

This is one of the most liberating and agitating truths we can learn. Because while our emotions are influenced by the world around us, the responsibility for understanding, regulating, and expressing them in healthy ways belongs to us—and only us.

When done right, we call it a lot of things—emotional intelligence, self-regulation, handling your shit. But what it actually looks like, when you're doing it right, is this: you sit in your own storm without expecting someone else to bring you an umbrella. You name your feelings without blaming someone else for them. You recognize when you're triggered, and instead of lashing out, you breathe, pause, and reach for a tool—maybe it’s a grounding exercise, maybe it’s journaling, maybe it’s stepping away to collect yourself.

Doing it right means you don’t weaponize your emotions or make them someone else’s burden. You don’t fish for reassurance under the guise of openness. You don’t collapse and expect someone to rescue you. You stay present. You stay honest. You stay responsible for what’s yours.

It doesn’t mean suppressing or denying what you feel. It means being in relationship with your emotions, not ruled by them. It means creating enough space between stimulus and response to choose something better. That’s real emotional strength—not being unshakable, but being willing to shake without losing your center.

“Emotional self-control-- delaying gratification and stifling impulsiveness- underlies accomplishment of every sort”
― Daniel Goleman

When it goes sideways, we call it drama, defensiveness, losing your shit, blowing up, spiraling, shutting down, or projecting. We assign different words to the fallout, but the mechanism is the same: emotional outsourcing. It’s that moment when your nervous system says, "I can’t handle this," and instead of pausing or resourcing, you hand the mess to someone else—through blame, guilt, manipulation, silence, or outburst.

This shows up everywhere: in relationships where one partner is always the emotional stabilizer, in teams where one person’s mood dictates the group’s vibe, in leadership where feedback gets weaponized as personal attack. It’s not about emotion being bad—emotion is holy. It’s about refusing to hold your own. About making someone else the janitor of your inner mess.

And it’s rampant. Especially among people who look like me—white, male, confident, expressive. We’ve been trained that feeling things deeply is fine, as long as someone else makes it go away fast.

Because something else besides your mind is at play when it comes to emotional regulation: Power dynamics

If you’re in a position of power—by status, by gender, by money, by personality—you’ve likely been trained (or trained others) to expect emotional caretaking. The unspoken command is: “Make me feel better.”

I’ve been there.

I built a decent chunk of my adult life on this exact dynamic. Subconsciously, I expected my former partner, Lynna, to help me manage my emotions. Same thing with my former business partner, Emily. I wasn’t intentionally trying to be manipulative or needy—it was simply a pattern I hadn’t yet examined. I mistook support for rescue, and vulnerability for dependence. Looking back, I can now see how exhausting that must have been for them - how often I unconsciously asked them to absorb what I didn’t want to face on my own.

I hold a lot of remorse for putting them through that. And I hold compassion for myself, too - not as an excuse, but as a way to honor the complexity of growth. Emotional outsourcing isn’t a character flaw. It’s a survival strategy that eventually stops working. And when it breaks down, it leaves everyone tired, misunderstood, and disconnected.

It took me years to understand that what I was doing wasn’t love—it was labor. And it wasn’t fair. Not to them. Not to me.

It wasn’t until Virginia, my partner now, drew clear boundaries—lovingly, firmly—and taught me the language of self-responsibility, that I started to understand the depth of this pattern. She didn’t coddle me. She didn’t placate me. She just refused to carry emotional weight that wasn’t hers. At first, it rattled me. Now I see it as one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever received.

And I want to pass that gift along.

The Canoe in the Rapids

Let me give you a metaphor:

Imagine you’re in a canoe—not one of those guided tour rafts with a cheerful dude barking instructions while you float passively downstream. No. You’re in a narrow, slightly wobbly canoe with someone you care about—your partner, your kid, your co-founder, your oldest friend—and the water ahead is foaming with chaos. The air smells like pine and tension. Your grip on the paddle is too tight. You’ve got a plan, but the river doesn’t care.

That’s life. That’s relationships. That’s waking up in a long-term partnership, launching something that actually matters to you, or walking into a lucid-dream-themed house party at 54 dressed like a cowboy pimp. (Yes, that happened. Read on.)

The rapids don’t care if you didn’t sleep well. Or if your childhood left you emotionally raw. Or if Mercury is in retrograde and your last therapy session ran long.

You either paddle, or you get spun. You either center, or you capsize. And when you capsize—and you will—you haul yourself back in the damn boat and try again.

The goal isn’t to avoid the rapids. It’s to build the internal strength to ride them with integrity. It’s steering without screaming at your partner to bail water. It’s not blaming the river for being wild. It’s not pretending the rocks don’t exist. It’s taking full ownership of the paddle in your hands and saying, “I’ve got this—at least for my end of the boat.”

And for that, you need three things:

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1. Resilience (The Real Kind)

Resilience isn’t about pushing through or pretending everything’s fine.
It’s your core strength—the ability to return to your center when life knocks you off balance. It’s the pause before the reaction. It’s the breath before the blow-up. It’s the sacred few seconds where you choose your response instead of defaulting to your triggers.

You don’t discover your resilience in a yoga class or reading a book about Stoicism. You discover it when you want to scream, ghost, rage, blame, collapse—and you don’t.
You come back to yourself instead.

That’s power.

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2. Resources (Inside and Out)

You don’t just white-knuckle your way through emotional regulation. You need tools. What my friend Massimo calls being “internally resourced.”

That means therapy. Coaching. Journaling. Movement. Sleep. Water. Prayer.

It also means knowing your Window of Tolerance—how much emotion you can process before you go into fight/flight/freeze mode.

It means understanding your Window of Capacity—your mental and emotional bandwidth. Sometimes you’re not "too sensitive"—you’re just tired as hell. Or hungry. Or grieving. Or overstimulated.

The more resourced you are, the better you steer the canoe.

And the better you steer, the more confident you become. Not because life is easier—but because you trust yourself to handle it.

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3. Reps (There Is No Shortcut)

You don’t become emotionally strong by talking about it.
You become emotionally strong by doing scary shit over and over again. Not recklessly—but intentionally.

You say the thing you’ve been avoiding.
You sit in the discomfort instead of fixing or fleeing.
You show up to the damn party in a feather boa and a dream mask, even though you’re the oldest guy in the room by ten years.

Last night, Virginia and I went to a birthday party. Theme: Lucid Dreaming. Costume required. House music all night. A few years ago, I would’ve skipped it. Too many “rule of 3” triggers. In this case:

• Dressed in a costume.

• House music (the literal opposite of country music!)

• Loud and louder

• Flashing lights

• People I don’t know + being the oldest person there

I would’ve bailed because I didn’t trust myself to emotionally regulate.

Or even worse, I would have tried to go and then sat in the parking lot spiraling out of control before going back home and eating an entire package of Fig Newtons.

Or even worse than that, I would have dumped in the lap of Virginia and said, "Here, you fix this."

Yikes.

But last night, even when I felt a little wobbly, I stayed. I got quiet when I needed to. I people-watched. I laughed at myself. I moved my body a little to the music, let the rhythm loosen my grip. I scanned the room and reminded myself: no one here is thinking about me as much as I think they are. I checked in with my breath. I found Virginia’s eyes across the room and smiled. I reminded myself that feeling out of place doesn’t mean I don’t belong. I remembered something my therapist Adrienne, taught me:
You can’t be curious and anxious at the same time.

So I chose curiosity.
And some playful "chisme" with Virginia helped too.

That’s getting the reps in.

You’ve got to continually work out your emotional regulation skills. You’ve got to continually find the edge.

That’s how this shit gets built.

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Power + Emotion = Responsibility

Now, back to power.

If you’re in a position of influence or authority (especially if you’re a man), there’s an extra layer to all of this. You’ve probably been conditioned to express emotional dysregulation as opinion. Loud certainty is often just fear in disguise. Rage is sadness that never learned how to speak.

And if you’re on the other side of the power imbalance? You’ve probably been taught—explicitly or implicitly—that you’re responsible for someone else’s emotional stability. That’s not empathy. That’s codependency.

One of the most radical things we can do—especially in relationships, leadership, and movement work—is to stop making other people carry what we refuse to deal with.

This isn’t just personal. It’s global.

Much of the world’s current shitshow—from toxic politics to religious extremism to cult-like fandoms—is rooted in people refusing to take responsibility for their own nervous systems. But it goes even deeper than that.

We are witnessing a collective psyche under stress. A shared nervous system, stretched thin by grief, fear, disconnection, and rapid change. When individuals don’t learn to regulate, that dysregulation scales; into movements, into mobs, into misinformation ecosystems. It’s not just polarization; it’s collective trauma reenacting itself in real time, looking for somewhere to land.

What we call “polarization” is often just unregulated trauma flinging opinions like spears—amplified by algorithms, monetized by outrage, and mirrored by millions who haven’t yet learned how to sit with discomfort without needing an enemy.

But let’s bring it back to the canoe.

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You Can Learn This. You Can Practice This.

You can build emotional strength. You can become less reactive and more responsive. You can learn to trust yourself in the rapids.

You can own your triggers without being your triggers.
You can feel everything and still choose how to act.
You can be scared and still stay in the boat.

Emotional regulation is not a trait. It’s a practice.
It’s earned. And it’s worth it.

I don’t want a life of comfortable avoidance. I want a life of courageous exploration.

I want to continue building the kind of strength that allows me to laugh at myself while feeling everything fully.

I want to be someone who runs toward the rapids—not because I like chaos, but because I trust my center.

And that, my friends, is what real power feels like.