The Champagne Bottle That Broke Me

I wasn’t angry about the champagne. I was angry about everything hiding beneath the numbness.

It was Thanksgiving morning at my mom’s house. We were making mimosas, just like we’d done a hundred times before. I loosened the wire cage on the champagne bottle, twisted it the way you’re supposed to, and it spewed everywhere.

And something in me snapped.

Not dramatically. No screaming, no slamming, no cinematic meltdown. Just a sharp, internal rupture with nowhere to go. I put the bottle down, harder than I intended, muttered something I can’t remember, and walked off like the universe had personally insulted me.

Another part of me was watching the whole thing, thinking, “Really, Lauren? Champagne?”

But my body didn’t care. It had already made the decision. Logic wasn’t invited.

A few minutes later my sister asked, “What is wrong with you?”

She meant it gently — what happened? But my system heard judgment, not curiosity. Shame punched me in the chest, hot and fast. And I snapped at her, too.

I knew it was absurd. If you’d paused that moment and asked what was actually wrong, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. Not because nothing was wrong — because everything was. Too much pressure. Too many swallowed emotions. Too many days of functioning without feeling.

Because, I wasn’t angry about the champagne. I couldn’t have told you what I was angry about. Anger requires emotional access, and I didn’t have that.

What I had was a body holding more pressure than it could contain, and the champagne bottle was just the valve that happened to blow.

For months before that Thanksgiving, I’d been numb. Completely, devastatingly numb.

Not sad. Not depressed. Not “having a hard time.” Just… gone. I’d wake up, get the kids ready, go through the motions, and feel absolutely nothing. No joy. No grief. No anger. No relief. Just a flat, grey blankness where emotions used to live.

People talk about numbness like it’s peaceful. Like it’s calm. It’s not. It’s crowded, with half-formed thoughts and unfinished reactions. But none of them make it to the surface. Because, without your permission, your body flipped the breaker on all emotional access to contain it all.

But containment doesn’t last forever.

The heat behind the door starts looking for any exit it can find. A sharp tone slips out. A slammed cabinet. A reaction that doesn’t match the moment. Before your nervous system can cap that hole, the pressure escapes, then it finds another crack, and another.

That’s the paradox that is so hard to understand and explain. You can be completely numb and completely overwhelmed at the same time. Flat one minute, flooded the next. Unable to cry, but also unable to tolerate anything.

Your body isn’t malfunctioning. It does exactly what it’s designed to do when the load exceeds your capacity. It shuts down emotional processing to conserve energy, but it can’t shut off the pressure. So the pressure finds other ways out.

A champagne bottle. A tone. A look. Anything.

What I know now is that I was in a state I now call the Ashes. It’s a state your nervous system enters when it’s been overloaded for too long. Not a mood. Not a choice. A physiological state where your body pulls the emergency brake on feeling because feeling has become too expensive.

The Ashes don’t look like falling apart. They look like functioning. Like showing up. Like being the reliable one who gets things done with no emotional mess attached.

But underneath? You’re running on fumes. And when you’re running on fumes, the smallest thing can ignite what’s been building in the dark.

That’s why the champagne bottle broke me. Not because it mattered. Because I’d been holding everything else so tightly that there was no room left for one more thing, even something as small and stupid as fizzy wine on a holiday morning.

But then came the shame.

I knew it was absurd. I knew I was overreacting. I knew my sister didn’t deserve that tone and the champagne didn’t deserve that energy and I should have been able to laugh it off like a normal person.

But when you’ve been numb for months, and your body finally finds a crack to release pressure through, you don’t get to choose what comes out or how it lands. You just get the aftermath. And the crushing awareness that something in you isn’t working the way it should.

Except, it was working the way it should.

My nervous system wasn’t broken. It was doing exactly what nervous systems do when they’ve been carrying too much for too long without support. It shut down the parts that cost too much energy (emotions, connection, joy), and it released pressure through the only outlets available (irritation, reactivity, sudden floods of feeling that didn’t match the moment).

That’s not dysfunction. That’s adaptation.

The problem wasn’t my reaction to the champagne. The problem was everything that led to a nervous system so overloaded that a champagne bottle could become the breaking point.

I think about that morning a lot now. Not because I’m proud of how I handled it. I’m definitely not. But because it was the first time I couldn’t ignore what was happening underneath the numbness.

For months, I’d been telling myself I was fine. I was managing. I was holding it together. And I was, on the outside. But my body was keeping a different score.

It was tracking every swallowed emotion. Every moment I performed stability I didn’t feel. Every day I showed up for everyone else while abandoning myself. Every night I ended up on the back porch staring into nothing, unable to feel a single thing.

The champagne bottle wasn’t the problem. It was the alarm.

And once I finally heard it, I couldn’t unhear it.

If you’ve ever lost it over something small, something that shouldn’t have mattered, something you knew didn’t match the moment, you’re not broken. You’re not overreacting. You’re not too sensitive or too much or failing at being a functional adult.

You’re just holding more than your system was designed to carry. And the pressure has to go somewhere.

Numbness and overwhelm aren’t opposites. They’re two sides of the same overloaded nervous system. One is the shutdown. The other is the release valve.

Both are your body trying to protect you the only way it knows how.

The champagne bottle taught me that. And once I understood it — once I stopped blaming myself for the reaction and started paying attention to what was underneath it — everything began to shift.

Not all at once. Not in some dramatic transformation. Just slowly. One recognition at a time.

That’s how rising actually works. Not by never breaking. By finally understanding why you broke in the first place.