When Emotions Have No Ground to Hold Them

During the pandemic, a familiar pattern appeared on a larger scale.
When a sluice gate is opened too late, water accumulates.
What first seems manageable slowly turns into pressure.
And pressure will always seek an exit.

The result is rarely safety.
The result is a sudden release — a flooding of what was held back for too long.
Inhabited areas become vulnerable, not because water is wrong, but because the channel remained closed for too long.

This is also how I look at the collective relationship with emotion.
Borders closed. Movement restricted. Expression regulated. Often with the intention to protect, to care, to keep things contained. Yet what is human — fear, grief, anger, longing — cannot be held indefinitely without gathering somewhere inside.

When emotions have no ground to hold them, pressure builds.
And when pressure becomes too great, release follows.
This is not failure. It is nature.

For me, this also echoes my own history: early experiences in which emotions could not always move freely, and were therefore stored rather than felt. What has no space in the moment often returns later — sometimes louder, sometimes unexpectedly.

The landscape mirrors us.
And if we are willing, we can learn from it. Not everything calls for tighter control.
Sometimes what is needed is earlier opening, gentler guidance, wiser regulation — so that what lives can move without harm.

Perhaps this is part of our collective maturation:
to look more honestly at emotion, to make room for it, and to give it a channel — before it becomes a flood.

In Belgium, suicide remains a quiet public health crisis: around 2,000 lives are lost each year.
Among young people, it is one of the leading causes of death.
This doesn’t call for sensationalism, but for mature attention to what often stays unseen—emotions without a safe channel, and pain carried alone for too long.