What’s Under Your Rug?

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Episode Transcript

Hi there, my name is Cameron Conaway. Welcome to 3-Minute Reframe.

We all know the idiom “don’t sweep it under the rug.” It’s usually a warning about hiding problems. But lately, I’ve been thinking less about the act of sweeping, and more about the rug itself.

In our busy lives, it is easier than ever to distract ourselves. We create rationalized reasons why we don’t need to address grief, or some type of discomfort, or that tough conversation we’ve been avoiding. I can raise my hand and say, at various points in my life, I’ve swept all of those things under the rug and then rationalized reasons for why I didn’t need to go back and lift up the rug to retrieve them.

Even right now, as I say these words, there are unaddressed lumps under my rug. It can be that we sweep things away so quickly that we often forget that we swept or even that we have a rug. The lumpy, uneven rug we walk over every single day becomes a new norm and may start to feel, well, perfectly flat.

So the reframe here is not to judge yourself for hiding things. Doing so is an incredibly human and sometimes incredibly important thing to do. The ask here is to shift into curiosity.

I want you to imagine your rug. What color is it? What is the texture? What is the shape of the things you may have intentionally or unintentionally swept under it? Maybe even draw all this out so you can get it out of your head and onto paper. Sometimes externalizing things in this way can help us see them in fresh new ways.

So this week, I invite you to lift up the corner of that rug. You don’t have to clean it all up today. Just be curious. What’s under there? What stories do you have about what’s under there? And what might it look like to let just one of those things see some light? See you next week.

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