A practical decision becomes an emotional reckoning, revealing why unresolved feelings demand as much care as possessions.
‘Vulnerability is not a liability. We cannot change what we do not acknowledge.’ I wrote these lines for a client and just hours later, I felt myself living the deep truth of it.
We sold my car last night. And it made me sad. It was a lovely car—the drive feel was effortless and it was a sweet ride for the most part—but it was madly impractical. My car had a ‘drinking problem,’ I used to joke. But the truth was, we had bought it without doing sufficient homework and within weeks, realised it had been a mistake. The fuel gauge seemed to plummet whimsically, and we suffered range anxiety in a petrol car on a drive to Goa—enough that we gave up road trips in this car.
Crawling through Bengaluru’s snail-paced traffic is bad enough, but the looming shift to E20—petrol blended with 20% ethanol—added anxiety about the wear and tear of a car not protected by the manufacturer’s warranty. It scared me into finally agreeing to sell it off.
The parting was inevitable, but I was also sad about the money. Unlike previous cars, which gave us great service and good resale value, I got back just half of what I paid in three years.
My son, who had been unusually quick to act—getting it evaluated and selling it off within the span of six hours—was surprised by my reaction. He didn’t want me to dwell on it. I told him, “I want to feel the sadness, not block it. Once I acknowledge it, it will pass.”
In the quiet of the elevator, as the lift doors slid shut, the suddenness of the parting settled into my chest. It wasn’t just about the car; it was about how abruptly I parted with something I genuinely liked.
As a biographer, I’ve spent my career documenting the turning points in other people’s lives—the moments where the trajectory shifts without warning or preparation. I have interviewed men and women who faced sudden institutional crises, health scares, or personal losses that dismantled their carefully constructed lives overnight. I have analysed their stories for lessons in resilience. Yet, in the rush of my own life, I rarely apply that same clinical eye to myself. I realised then that the shock of the sudden—even in a trivial instance like selling a car—is almost as painful as the loss itself, because it robs us of the chance to say goodbye on our own terms. We are forced into the next chapter before we have finished reading the previous one.
From a biographer’s perspective, I am accustomed to finding the thread of meaning in the chaos of a life’s middle chapters. I tell my clients that vulnerability is the key to a compelling and honest narrative, yet the car sale was a humbling reminder that theory and practice are two different things. It is easy to plot a graph of resilience for someone else; it is much harder to feel the jagged edges when they are cutting into your own sense of stability.
I was worried about what E20 would do to the insides of my car, but how much did I heed what unresolved pain could do to me? We are quick to safeguard the mechanics of our possessions—fretting over fuel compatibility, oil levels, and warranty expiration—yet we are negligent with the internal mechanics of our own lives. We let emotional stressors accumulate like sludge in a fuel line, assuming they will eventually flush themselves out if we ignore them long enough. But unresolved pain, much like corrosive fuel, operates quietly below the surface. It eats away at our capacity for joy, narrows our patience, and stiffens our resilience. By the time the dashboard lights of our own well-being start flashing warnings, the damage is often deep, requiring far more than a simple tune-up to repair.
I had a warm bath last night, and I coaxed myself to the gym this morning. Neither fixed the sadness, and I didn’t expect them to—that was the difference. I wasn’t using them to skip past the feeling, the way I might have years ago; I was tending to myself alongside it. The energy of the gym, the rhythm of a workout, lifted me anyway, but only because I’d let the sadness sit first instead of exercising it away. Rest and recovery work when they follow acknowledgment, not when they substitute for it.
We don’t need to hide our struggles; we need to bring them into the light so we can reduce their hold, so the burden doesn’t grow huge enough to break us. The only way forward is to feel all the emotions sadness brings, acknowledge its presence, and then write the next chapter—allowing the story to continue.
*Sandhya Mendonca, author, biographer, podcaster, and publisher at Raintree Media, offers a distinct female gaze of the world in this column.
