It’s hard…
It’s hard to be human.
It’s difficult to fully expose who we are, and to be comfortable putting that person out there, regardless of any judgment that may result from it.
We all know that other people may judge us, but how often do you devote thought to the fact that you are probably also judging yourself every time you expose vulnerability?
Getting comfortable with who we are includes accepting and indeed, loving, all of our emotions and feelings, including the negative ones.
The fact that you feel negative at the moment does not make you a negative person. The fact that right now, you feel angry and resentful, does not make you an angry, resentful person.
It has been years since I’ve cried openly. It’s not because I don’t feel overwhelmed with emotion at times (in fact, I do, often). Rather, it’s that as soon as I begin to feel that way, I clamp down and assert control over how I am feeling.
Why?
To protect myself. To prevent myself from experiencing emotions that I judge weak, or negative, or unhelpful. To ensure that I am a positive person, and not a negative one.
I currently feel overwhelmed, some despair, and at times, like I’m throwing life away. That doesn’t mean that I’m in over my head, suffering depression, or a failure. It just means that I too experience emotions like overwhelm and fear.
I am working to embrace these emotions as part of who I am, and to share them more openly. I invite you to do the same.
It’s hard to be human – but it’s worth it.
Accepting what is, but not necessarily accepting it as immutable, is the critical element I believe. Those who suffer, and I do mean suffer, from perfectionist tendencies can have difficulty with accepting, even as a work in progress, their current self. Without this qualified acceptance, it can be very difficult to fully expose oneself.
With respect to negativity, I’ve found that attempting to isolate the main source(s) can be helpful, rather than merely suppressing it. In my case I believe it’s my aspirational and optimistic traits which I feel are so often let down by the world which I can easily view as mediocre, ignorant, wasteful etc. I allow my expectations to be violated. Developing an acceptance of the status quo, even while working towards bettering it, is the biggest help in neutralizing the outward perception of negativity, I’ve found.
Touching on your illustrative emotional offerings, these are the results of a life examined, and to paraphrase Socrates: the unexamined life is not worth living. The burden of the thinking person.
Absolutely – observing and noticing goes a long way towards understanding the relationship we have with how we feel. We can’t change who we are, but we can learn to see that the way we feel or react doesn’t determine who we are as a person.