Vulnerability and personal experiences

I get a lot of people saying to me ‘You’re just so happy and smiley and you make my day so much brighter!’ This is very sweet and I do tend to spend 99% of my day bouncing round in a hyper fashion hugging everyone I know multiple times. However, they do say never to judge a book by its cover. Believe it or not, there are times when I get sad and feel like hiding away from the world with my cuddly toys, pretending I’m 5 again. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I’m putting on an act and secretly I’m really depressed. I am genuinely a happy person. But the problem I’m learning a lot about lately is that I find it near impossible to show people any negative emotion.

When I was a little girl, a wise woman once said to me ‘Don’t let anyone make you cry in public. You don’t want to show the world your weaknesses.’ I never quite realised how much I took that to heart until tonight, when the thing I desperately needed to do was just let go and do just that and my heart and brain simultaneously said ‘Woah, calm down there. None of that sobbing business. Hold it in.’ So I did. I did precisely the opposite of what I knew was for the best and I screwed my eyes up and held it in. But this isn’t good, and it isn’t healthy. We’re all human, and we all need to express our full range of emotions otherwise we’re not being fully ourselves. I’m talking mainly to the guys here, although I do know girls struggle with this too. We are proud beings, and we don’t like it when people can see through our invincibility act.

When I cry or show any signs of being upset in public, the sadness is replaced by embarrassment very quickly. I remember being in high school and being so wound up by one of the guys I knew that I ran away and broke down into tears. I was mortified, and what made it worse was that I couldn’t stop. Looking back, I think my body was just so relieved to be expressing what it was feeling that it refused to attempt to bottle it again. My point is, why are we embarrassed by our innermost feelings and emotional displays of them? It seems to make no sense…

That is, until you decide to go deeper and look at the cause of this embarrassment. That’s what I was forced to do tonight. I was forced to look at parts of myself and my history that I’d suppressed and locked away and built walls around and guarded with everything I had. And let me tell you, it was not a pleasant experience at all. But I knew it wouldn’t be when I started. So this is going to be quite a personal post for a change, and hopefully what I learned will help you if you’re going through the same things I am. It’s a tough lesson to learn, but I promise it gets better.

One of the things I struggle with most (which may come as a bit of a surprise to some) is my self-esteem. It’s something I’ve been working on for a while now and I feel it’s getting there. But God keeps bringing things up that break me, again and again. Tonight, I looked in a mirror and was suddenly very conscious that I was judging myself, and not at all favourably. I can feel people nodding along with me. It’s a very common problem. We see all of the flaws that are ‘impossible to fix’ and we do that big sigh and roll of our eyes that signals ‘I give up. Time to gorge on chocolate and get fat because there’s no point putting any effort in any more.’ I know there are people out there reading this who feel exactly the same way I do.

So then I felt like I should pray into this because my issues are a lot bigger than that, and they are holding me back from reaching my full potential, and I figured this was a good place to start. I sat down and began, and suddenly I was overcome with vivid memories ranging from being around 7 to very recent events. All of them pointed to one obvious thing that I struggle with, and I suspect that a lot of others struggle with too; I just don’t feel like I’m enough. (wow, this is getting very personal…) So as I was trying to pray through these things, I felt the familiar burning sensation in my eyes that precedes the flooding of tears. Which brings us back to how I started off this post. Except then I decided to figure out why I was holding back my emotions, especially as I trusted the people I was with not to stare at me.

This is what it ultimately comes down to, for me at least. I can’t speak for others because there’s a variety of reasons why people are emotionally closed. But here’s mine; crying signals being vulnerable. I can’t be vulnerable because that would mean letting people into my life in a way that I have never done before. Not even my family see me cry. I lock my door and sit against it for added protection, and I only reappear when I’m sure nobody could tell from looking at me that I’ve been crying. If I have to cry in public, like at funerals, it’s a quiet stream with no sobbing, no actual display of the gutwrenching feeling you get when you really cry (I know you all understand so I won’t explain further). The same wise woman gave me another invaluable piece of advice, which was ‘You don’t need anyone but yourself to be happy.’ Sounds good, right? No being dependent on men who may not even stick around, or friends who don’t necessarily have you as their first concern. Plus it means not being vulnerable, and not really showing your deepest and truest emotions to anyone – which is definitely good because that means nobody can really hurt you.

Except this is a bad way to think. Part of me can’t even realise I didn’t know this before now. There is someone who we need to trust completely, and be the most vulnerable with. Someone who knows our deepest and truest emotions without us showing them, although I’m pretty sure us doing so makes Him insanely happy. Of course, I’m talking about God here. It takes time to adjust to but being completely open and vulnerable with God, even with all the bad aspects of you, means that you have such a close and precious relationship it’s insane. I thought I had this – and to some extent I do because I’ve given up every aspect of my life to His plan. Except actually I haven’t.

Tonight, I learnt that there are parts of me that I haven’t shown to a single person. There are parts of me that I doubt I will ever show to another human being because they cause me so much pain. But even worse than this, there are parts of me that I haven’t shown to God. And tonight, that was definitely His aim. It became a battle – God gently probing and bringing up things I’d blocked out from my memory, and me trying desperately to suppress them. I’m pretty sure at one point I cried out (silently) for God to stop because I couldn’t handle it. (Apologies for it getting deep and depressing here, it does get better I swear!) Realising this made me fight harder, but against myself. I WANT God to be able to claim every single aspect of me, even the aspects that I deny myself. And I know that I can work through it all because I began to do that tonight.

Before I even knew that was the aim of the night, I was worshipping when I heard God say to me ‘This is really going to hurt, but it’s worth it. You need it.’ And He definitely wasn’t kidding. It wasn’t my best night. But I feel a lot more peace now, and I’m so thankful that I started it – even though it took away every ounce of my strength and made me feel so insanely vulnerable that I took a considerable amount of time pulling myself back together afterwards.

So my posts always have an overarching point, and here’s the one for tonight; if you know there are issues in your life that you’re blocking out and pretending don’t exist – stop. We can do all things through Him who strengthens us. That includes working through very painful memories. We just have to have faith that God will turn up. And He always does. Always. Tonight has started me off on a path as well as simultaneously demonstrating to me that I don’t put enough of myself in my friendships. Rather fitting, with Valentine’s Day just around the corner – to be in a loving and successful relationship you have to be prepared to be completely vulnerable with the other person, even though that technically gives them the power to crush you. (can you tell I’m single and bitter? Hahaha xD joking, I love couples, and I’m very excited to spend Singles Awareness Day with some of my nearest and dearest friends)

Basically, vulnerability is good. Crying in public is good. Sharing everything with God is good. I’m going to stop now because this is already far too personal for me to be comfortable with sharing on a blog and funnily enough posting this makes me feel very vulnerable, which is good because I want to be more open and vulnerable with you lot but at the same time I’m not quite sure I’m at the level where I post all my feelings on a website. Only those which may help others. None of the others, thank you very much.

Now it is cold and I am tired and feeling slightly nauseous due to the large volume of chocolate covered raisins I have stuffed my face with. (This totally links in with what I said earlier about not making an effort to look good any more. Chocolate will be the end of me one day.) This signals bed time. I may or may not end up deleting this post. If you stayed with me this far and understood at least one sentence of my thought process which I appear to have just transferred from my brain to my laptop, I commend you. I don’t think even I’d be able to do that. Hopefully you took away at least one good point!