The Toolbox | Processing emotions without alcohol

Happiness is a full socket set box, 10mm included

I lost my toolbox last week. Not misplaced it, not lent it to someone and forgotten who. It fell off the back of my ute while I was driving home, bounced across the road and was gone inside six minutes! Twenty kilos of tools I had been collecting and using for forty years, including specialist tools I had made myself for maintaining my own aircraft. Gone. Just like that.

The tailgate was down. I knew it was down. I had been refuelling at the hangar and left my jerry cans on the floor, put the toolbox in the tray, got distracted and forgot to close it. Drove twenty kilometres in the dark before I heard a crash and thought it was just sliding around back there. Three minutes up the road I got home, realised what had happened, and raced back.

There was a man in his vehicle sitting on the side of the road when I got there. He told me a woman had already picked up the toolbox and was going to post about it on Facebook or some such thing. A few minutes in, he reached across and handed me a screwdriver and a 10mm socket. Said he found them after she left.

If you have ever owned a toolbox in your life, you already understand the 10mm socket. They disappear. It is practically a law of nature. And here was one, sitting in this man's hand on the side of a dark country road, handed back to me with a kind of quiet ceremony, two items from twenty kilos of everything I had worked with for forty years.

I took it all at face value. I stayed behind after he left and swept the road with my phone torch looking for anything else that might have scattered. There was nothing. I drove home with a screwdriver, a socket and a slowly forming knot in my chest.

The week that followed surprised me.

I expected to be annoyed at myself and move on. What I didn't expect was the range of what came through or the order it arrived in.

First came the disbelief at my own carelessness, twenty kilometres with a twenty kilo toolbox perched on the back of an open tray. Then the horror that arrived right behind it when I thought about what might have happened if it had come off at a hundred kilometres an hour with a car following close behind. That thought sat with me for a while. It still does.

Then the anger arrived and it wasn't entirely directed at myself. The more I thought about the man on the side of the road, the more something didn't add up. When he reached across to hand me the screwdriver, I noticed the passenger side of his ute. I noticed where his eyes went. I couldn't be certain of anything, but the thought that someone might have viewed my loss as an opportunity lodged itself in my mind and wouldn't shift.

After the anger came the bargaining. The if-onlys. If only I had put the tailgate up. If only I hadn't left my refuelling cans on the hangar floor and needed to make that extra trip. If only I had checked before I drove off. The mind goes looking for the exact moment where a different small decision changes everything and it will run that search for as long as you let it.

Then something quieter moved in. Not quite sadness, but close to it. I started talking to myself into the night. Everything is replaceable, I told myself. It'll cost a bit, but you can replace it. But that wasn't quite true, not in the way I was reacting for it. The tools I had made myself for the aircraft couldn't just be ordered online. And beyond the practicalities of replacing anything, there was something else underneath it that I eventually found a name for.

I was grieving. It sounds almost blasphemous to say it, but there it is

Not in the way I know real grief. I know what real grief feels like and this was something smaller, but it had the same shape and feel.

The disbelief, the anger, the bargaining, the low feeling that settled in, the frustration at the practical path ahead. These were not random moods. They were a sequence. And the object at the centre of it had been part of my hands-on life for as long as I could remember.

I know that whenever we have an attachment to something, there is emotion and we have the potential to feel loss. I was attached to my toolbox, I had built an aeroplane with the tools inside. Shaping and forming aluminium, cutting out panels, filing sharp edges square, drilling endless holes, riveting assemblies together. Each tool told a story of how I built a flying machine over several years.

I joined several local Facebook groups and posted about what had happened. I kept it calm. I didn't mention the man on the road. I'm not sure I would have managed that composure in an earlier chapter of my life.

That brought the anger back. And with the anger came more certainty about the man, more reconstruction of the scene, more detail added to a story I couldn't actually verify. This is what the mind does when it has no resolution to work with. It builds one out of whatever it has.

I sat with that for a while and then I made a decision.

Not a resolution. Not a promise to feel better. A decision to hand the whole thing over to something larger than my own internal courtroom, where I had been serving simultaneously as prosecutor, witness and judge without any actual evidence. I have done this before, in much harder circumstances than a missing toolbox and I know it works for me. The feelings were valid and I let them continue. What I was handing over was the story I kept feeding on top of them. I chose to move it along.

It is not a dramatic thing, this handover. It just means I stop prosecuting a case I cannot win against a man I cannot be certain wronged me and I let the loss be what it is. A loss. Something that happened. Something I am allowed to feel, and something I can move through without a verdict.

That is still a practice, not a destination. The thought comes back. I return the handover.

For now that is the work.

The toolbox is gone. The 10mm socket is sitting on my workbench. The screwdriver is back with the others.

I heard nothing from the local Facebook groups. I don't know what happened to the rest of it. I have made my peace with not knowing, or at least I am practising making my peace with it, which is the truest version of the same thing.

What I do know is that I got home last Tuesday night, heard a crash, kept driving, and ended up with a week of feelings I didn't expect. What I know is that I processed all of the emotions without alcohol and I noticed things I wouldn't have noticed before. I stayed calm when posting, I found a path to acceptance without needing a verdict, and I slept without a hangover.

Six years ago I know exactly how I would have handled it. And I know what would have been waiting for me the next morning.

As for whoever ended up with the rest of it, they have a twenty kilo toolbox now. But somewhere in that toolbox there is a Kincrome socket set with a gap where the 10mm should be. They will reach for it one day, probably at the worst possible moment and it won't be there.

Whether that means anything probably depends on what you believe.

I know what I believe. Karma.

The toolbox is replaceable. Mostly. The 10mm socket, as it turns out, I already have one of.

---

Tired of suppressing your feelings and numbing out with alcohol? Book a no-obligation strategy call to discuss where you are at and how I can help you find understanding and freedom around alcohol.

Free Strategy Call

45min

Book Now

Not ready for a strategy call, but

tired of the same Drink → Regret → Resolve → Repeat?

Start with understanding, get the Free Guide PDF Download,

or try my Free 7 Day Alcohol Clarity Reset course.