MGEL Click: Freedom Looks Like Socks
Breakthroughs don’t always look big. Sometimes they look like a hoodie, a pair of fuzzy socks, and uncontrollable laughter.
I’m in the middle of a major nervous system rewrite (more on that here) and I’m learning things I never knew about myself. I’m learning that small things can carry big consequences when you’re viewing them through the lens of trauma.
There was a year I grew like a weed. I can’t remember how many inches but it was significant. We only got clothes at the beginning of the school year, and halfway through I grew out of my pants. Kids being kids, someone made fun of me. I don’t remember who, when, or how often. It could have been once or a hundred times. It could have been in jest, or it could have been in cruelty.
Whatever way it happened, my brain received it as a threat. By that time I’d already developed a trauma core around being cast out of the tribe, of being left behind. My nervous system was already fully dysregulated. It was like a house with an open floor plan - any emotion, regardless of the situation, flooded the room. So that one moment - however many times it happened - didn’t land as a joke or as kids being kids, I took it as a threat to my personhood, to my belonging.
Since the experience was encoded as a threat, it stuck. Back then, it manifested itself in shame and embarrassment. Wanting to hide, to shrink, to make myself invisible. I didn’t even realize it, but I carried that into adulthood. It shows up in many different ways but for the sake of brevity, my brain used socks as a low-stakes proxy for a high-stakes fear: if I choose wrong, I’ll be exposed again. It makes me feel like a sitting duck, like the floor could drop out from under me at any moment.
Now I’m learning there’s a whole different way to experience emotions. Turns out, in a regulated system, emotions have containers - they don’t leak into your self-worth. They don’t make you feel like you have to hide or shrink inside yourself. In a regulated system, it’s possible to experience embarrassment and not have it feel like a soul-level injury. In a regulated system, if the situation is small, the emotion is accordingly small. If you address the emotion, it resolves. It doesn’t linger for hours, days, weeks. It doesn’t coat you in a film of shame and disgust.
So when I went to change into comfy clothes and my shame spiral didn’t start? When I took a split second to decide what socks to wear instead of agonizing over the decision? When I picked a pair of socks that I have never allowed myself to wear with this hoodie because the blues didn’t match? The absence of self-hate, shame, criticism, the internal voice that is constantly telling me I’m worthless made me feel so good I started laughing. In my lived memory, choosing socks usually came with some kind of internal fallout. Yet here I was doing it in a fraction of a second and not being upset by my choice. The decision wasn’t the breakthrough - the silence was. The quiet in place of hate is so peaceful. So spacious. I could really get used to it here.
If your socks are carrying more weight than they should, it might not be about the socks. Follow it back to the root. Challenge the core belief. It might help you set that weight down.
