Living at Half Volume
I think most of us are walking around at half volume. Not sad - just turned down. You do the day. You check the things off. And somewhere underneath it there's this quiet, nagging sense that there's more to actually feel, more to actually experience, and it stays just out of reach. Hard to name. Easy to ignore. Until it isn't.
There's a quote I can't fully remember, and I've never been able to find it again, something about how lucky you'd be to look back on your life and say you got to experience even a few moments with the volume turned all the way up. The birth of a child. A wedding day. A quiet, perfect afternoon in nature you can still feel in your body years later.
But it's not always the beautiful moments that get through. Sometimes it's heartache so intense it punches straight through the wall whether you were ready or not, a loss, a goodbye, a grief that levels you. That's full volume too. Maybe even more than the joyful moments, because pain doesn't usually ask permission the way joy does. It just breaks through.
Which makes me wonder what it is about those specific moments. Because most of life doesn't get experienced that way, at full volume, wide open, nothing held back.
We'll sit down to watch a movie and completely fall apart for people who don't exist. We feel a character's heartbreak like it's our own. We grieve a loss that never happened. We fall in love alongside someone on a page. Full volume, no hesitation, walls all the way down for people who aren't even real.
And then we go back to our own lives, where the volume gets turned back down.
I don't think that's a coincidence. I suspect… it's because it's subconsciously safe to feel everything for a character. They're not real. Nothing can actually hurt us there. We can hand over our whole heart to their story because there's no real risk attached, we get (what we think is) all of the feeling with none of the exposure.
Our own lives don't offer that same safety. Real connection, real passion, real feeling, all of it comes with actual stakes. So instead, we keep it at arm's length. Behind the to-do list. Behind the tiredness. Behind everything else we tell ourselves is more urgent right now.
I don't have this fully figured out, and I'm not sure anyone does. But I wonder if that nagging empty feeling isn't emptiness at all. Maybe it's the opposite. Maybe it's everything you're still capable of feeling at full volume, joy and heartbreak both, fully intact, just waiting behind a wall you built for good reason at some point and never took back down.
This is a lot of what I see in session work. Not always dramatic breakthroughs. Sometimes it's just someone finally letting themselves feel something they'd been keeping at a safe, fictional distance from their own life.
I don't have a tidy answer for how to take the wall down. I'm not sure a blog post is where that happens anyway. But I think it starts with noticing it's there.
If this stirred something, I'd love to talk. Book a free consultation and we can explore what's on the other side of that wall.
