Letter to the Prefrontal Cortex

Dear Prefrontal Cortex, 

You are pretty important. My life is literally in your hands: keeping emotions from spilling over, turning reactions into decisions. Still, most of the time anger gets there first. The amygdala comes into light, and you have to work overtime to make sense of it.

But maybe anger isn’t always the enemy. Sometimes it’s what wakes us up. It’s energy that needs a place to go, and when it passes through you, it turns into something sharper, something that can be built instead of burned. Maybe that’s why thoughts feel easiest when everything else feels too loud. You help shape that chaos into sentences, paragraphs, meaning.

We talk about emotional intelligence and regulation like it’s about control, but maybe it’s more about direction; taking that rush and giving it form. You don’t silence emotion; you translate it. And in that translation, frustration turns into clarity.

Image Source: The entire Self Reflected micro-etching under violet and white light by Greg Dunn, Brian Edwards, and Will Drinker