Who Felt Fifteen Feelings at Once
"Finn feels everything — fiercely, fully, ferociously.
Sometimes before breakfast."
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Finn the fox felt absolutely EVERYTHING.
Fiercely. Fully. Ferociously.
When something was funny, Finn laughed until his whole body shook and the birds flew out of the tree above him. When something was frightening, his heart flung itself against his ribs. When something was unfair — even small things, even tiny, silly things — the fury came up so fast it arrived before he knew it was coming.
He was furious one moment, then fizzing with full joy — then suddenly flat and foggy.
Sometimes all five feelings happened before first light.
He didn't choose to feel everything so ferociously. It was just how his feelings came.
The other forest animals found Finn… a lot.
"You're so loud," said Fern the frog. "You're far too much," said Fletcher the finch.
He tried to be less. He held his feelings down like pressing on something that wanted to float.
He found that feelings pressed down didn't disappear. They just waited. And came back bigger.
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Or read Harriet — always completely free 🦔One Friday afternoon, something unfair happened at the forest gathering. Someone took the flat stone that Finn always sat on. It was a small thing. A very small thing.
But the fury came up before Finn could stop it. He said something sharp and too loud and wrong. He didn't mean it — not really. But it hit his friend Flo right in the middle, and she went very quiet.
Finn sat down on the forest floor in the fallen leaves and stayed there for a long time.
He wasn't furious anymore. He was flat and foggy and full of a feeling he didn't have a word for yet.
He hadn't wanted to be too much. He had wanted to be enough. And somewhere, the two things had gone wrong.
That evening, Finn's grandmother came to find him still sitting in the fallen leaves.
She was an old, flame-coloured fox who had felt many things in her full life. She sat down beside him without asking what was wrong.
After a while, Finn told her. About Flo. About the stone. About how fast the fury came. About how he had tried to be less but the trying just made things worse.
His grandmother was quiet for a moment. Then she didn't tell him to calm down. She didn't say "stop feeling so much." She looked at him for a long time and said something Finn never forgot:
Finn looked up. "What's a foxhole?" he asked.
His grandmother smiled. "Something safe," she said. "Something familiar. Somewhere your feelings can land softly — instead of landing on someone else."
A foxhole to rest in.
Finn thought about that for a very long time.
Not a place to stop feeling. Not a place to pretend the feelings weren't there, or to press them down until they came back bigger. Just a safe, familiar, quiet place where they could settle for a moment. Like a forest hollow where the wind didn't reach.
He tried things. One by one, he found what foxhole felt right for him:
None of them stopped the feelings. But they gave the feelings somewhere to go that wasn't someone else's chest.
The next morning, Finn went to find Flo.
He had spent the whole evening in his foxhole — walking the long way through the forest until the fizzing had faded and the shame had settled into something quieter. Now he could say what he needed to say.
"I'm sorry for what I said yesterday. It came out before I could catch it. I'm learning to catch it sooner." He paused. "I don't always get it right."
Flo looked at him for a moment.
Finn didn't know what to say. He felt fourteen things at once, as usual. But this time most of them were warm.
Big feelings aren't bad feelings. They hold everything — the fury and the joy together. That's what makes them feel so enormous.
The feelings didn't go away.
That wasn't the ending. Finn still felt the fury arrive before he could stop it. He still sometimes went flat and foggy for a whole afternoon for no reason he could name. He still fizzed with joy so large it startled the birds.
But now he had his foxhole. And he knew where it was.
One afternoon, deep in the ferns, he found a young fox named Flora sitting very still in the fallen leaves. Her face looked like someone carrying something too large for their paws.
Finn knew that face.
He sat down beside her. He didn't say "calm down" or "stop feeling so much."
He said: "I know a foxhole. Do you want to walk there with me?"
All the wonderful F words in this story — and what they mean.
Some children are called "too much." Too loud, too sensitive, too reactive. They hear it often enough that they begin to believe it is simply who they are — a problem to be managed, a temperature to be turned down. Finn's story is for those children.
What Finn experiences — big feelings arriving fast, with intensity that is hard to regulate in the moment — is something many children live with, whether or not it has a formal name. The story doesn't diagnose. What it does instead is offer a different framing: the capacity to feel deeply and completely is not a flaw. It is the same fire that produces the enormous joy, the fierce loyalty, the laughter that startles birds. The goal is not to extinguish it — it is to give it a foxhole.
The book also gently acknowledges the harder truth that big feelings sometimes spill onto people we love. This isn't glossed over. Finn hurts his friend, feels the weight of that, and does the work of repair. That arc matters: it says to children that having big feelings doesn't make you bad, and that making a mistake is not the end of the story.
If your child recognises themselves in Finn, the most useful thing you can do is help them find their own foxhole — the physical, sensory, or creative activities that allow their nervous system to settle without suppressing. Movement, making, breathing, naming. What helps is not less feeling. It's somewhere safe for the feeling to land.