People sometimes ask me why I built Box of feels. They expect a nice answer. Something about wanting to help people.
That's true now. But it didn't start there. It started with outrage.
In a past marriage, I was told that my emotions were too demanding for the relationship. That she couldn't be my emotional support person.
I'm not going to tell her side of that. I'm sure she had one. But it's outrageous to me. I've lived with bipolar type 1 for more than twenty years. I feel everything, and I feel it intensely. My emotions are part of the package. And I was being told they were too much.
After that, I had a year of time to myself. A lot of soul searching. A lot of asking, what do I actually do with all of this?
My psychiatrist, I'll call him Dr Hughes, kept encouraging me to get granular with my emotions. Not just "I feel bad" or "I'm not good", but what exactly I was feeling, and where it was coming from. For ten years I'd called it "the bad feeling". That was about as granular as I got.
Then I found an article on the granularity of emotion, and something clicked. I could see what Dr Hughes was getting at. I could also see his way wasn't going to suit me. I'm a cartoonist and a builder. I think in pictures and systems. I knew I had a better way for me.
So I started writing.
I wrote articles about boxing it up. About shipping it off. About the verse that says hope deferred makes the heart sick. About something I call Black Fusion. I wrote and wrote, trying to put shape around what was going on inside me.
And somewhere in that writing, I realised: this is my life's work.
All the hard stuff I'd been through, the illness, the hospital stays, the marriages, the twelve boxes on the veranda, it had all been teaching me how to handle big feelings. Now I wanted to hand that to other people in a way they could actually use.
So I asked the AI a question. What would it look like to turn my articles into a tool or an app that people can use?
That's how Box of feels started.
Today it's a whole machine. You can put a feeling on the dock. You can send it down the conveyor. You can put it on the writing desk to work on, or on the bookshelf when it's done. Some things go in the basement for a while, because they're not ready yet.
I use it myself, nearly every day. It's how I get a feeling out of my nervous system and into somewhere safe.
I find it funny, looking back. I was told my emotions were too much for one person to carry. Fair enough. So I built something that could hold them. And now it holds other people's too.
There's one box in my basement I haven't been able to move yet. It's about my dad, the most supportive man I know, and a feeling towards him that made no sense until I traced it back to a five-year-old boy.
That story is in the book.
If you're struggling right now, call Lifeline on 13 11 14. In an emergency call 000.
