Quicksilver

On the shifting nature of feelings

This reflection is about the way feelings shift and slip through our hands. It is also about what they leave behind, and the gifts that can move across generations.

I have always known that feelings are slippery. They shift, sometimes without warning. They refuse to be pinned down. I know this from my work as a psychologist and from my own experiences in the world, but until recently I had never named it fully. Yesterday, an email from my adolescent therapist, Nancy, finally gave me the word: quicksilver.

If you’ve followed my story, you know Nancy well. She first met me at sixteen. She treated me for anorexia for a year and a half. I spent that time trying to hide behind a self-constructed wall, and somehow, she found a way to reach me. Three decades later, I found her and reconnected, not as patient and therapist but as something new. She has read my memoir. She reads my Substack reflections and responds almost daily. Somehow she still helps me find words for truths I struggle to name.

Recently, I sent Nancy the new conclusion to my manuscript. There are several paragraphs about our reconnection, and I wanted her to know exactly how much she means to me, even today, thirty years after we last worked together. She wrote me a beautiful response. Buried in it was the following: “Emotions are a moving target… impossible to describe, yet so deeply felt… like quicksilver. You can’t hold them. They evolve and morph into yet another, and another.”

When I read her email, I felt a visceral yes in my body: feelings really are like quicksilver. They shape-shift. They are impossible to hold in one form for long. Some feelings we want to freeze in time: the comfort of being understood, the sweetness of a warm hug, the relief of being accepted as we are. Others we try to outrun: shame, grief, the panic of being exposed. Positive or negative, feelings slip through our fingers. They never stay.

I learned this in graduate school in simple terms. If you can help a patient stay with a difficult feeling long enough, the feeling will pass. What I learned later is that this truth is not confined to the therapy room. It shows up in ordinary life. For me, it shows up often in writing. A post on Monday can contradict the one on Tuesday. Sometimes my feelings shift inside a single paragraph.

Later in the same email thread, Nancy shared that “quicksilver” was not her invention. Early in her career, she told me, “one of the greatest gifts (and there were many) that Barbara, my former supervisor, gave to me was this: ‘Always remember, Nancy, that feelings are like quicksilver.’ That image was seared into my psyche the moment she said it, and has served me well throughout my years as a therapist. Imagine my genuine joy to know that once again, Barbara has played a significant role in your journey with me then and now.”

What Nancy was referring to was this: years after Barbara taught her about quicksilver, when I was Nancy’s teenage patient, we had a session that left her shaken. She told me she called Barbara on the drive home, crying. “Barbara,” she said, “this is too hard. I can’t do this work.” Barbara answered, “Nancy, that is exactly why you can do this work.”

Reading those words now, I hear more than supervision. I hear a lineage. If trauma can echo across generations, so can gifts. Barbara is gone, but her wisdom lives in Nancy. Nancy carried it into the room with me. She is still sharing it with me. Now it lives in me, and I carry it into my work, my parenting, and my writing.

Barbara taught Nancy, who taught me, that feelings are like quicksilver. We cannot keep feelings from moving, but we can honor what they leave behind. What remains may not be simple, but it stays with us and lives on, carried forward through all the relationships that matter most.