honest

I recently had a counselling session where I learned about how much I let myself experience anger instead of sadness in an effort to avoid vulnerability. Anger is a lot more comfortable for me. It’s like armor. And it’s safe. For a long time it has kept me from ‘breaking down’ in front of others. It has allowed me to hold onto some semblance of control over how I am perceived.

My homework after that session was to write my own life story from the perspective of Sadness as a character. I could not bring myself to write that story so instead I wrote a list of every single thing I’ve ever experienced sadness about (that I could think of in one sitting) and the list came to almost 80 separate moments in my life where I either did or did not experience sadness, but that was what that moment would have called for if I had given myself permission.

It’s been a long lesson but I’m still in the thick of it: how to befriend my tears.

I’m learning that honesty is the only way to write these days - I’m obviously getting things wrong and all I can do is keep failing boldly, and learning all the time. But I’m tired of not writing for fear of being wrong or bad.

Writing your thoughts and letting people read them is one of the most vulnerable things I think someone can do. It’s comparable to laying bare your thoughts and feelings on a canvas, leaving all you have out on the field or the track or the stage.

I am afraid of what people say or think when they read my words. That is honest.

The silence I experience in the rare event that I am alone in my home feels like a kind respite from the nothing and something going on outside. And at the same time the silence can be deafening when it means listening to my own inner dialogue. It feels like writing has been a coping mechanism lately, an outlet, an antidote for something that I will never truly be cured of.