07/02/2025
Somewhere along the way, I came to believe that being emotional meant being weak, wrong, or even dangerous.
Some emotions in the house took up all the space. There wasn’t room for mine. I absorbed the belief that love meant caretaking. That to be accepted, I had to be the calm one, the strong one, the steady one. I tried to become small, quiet, easy—to shape myself into the kind of person who wouldn’t disrupt the fragile emotional balance around me.
So I learned to lock everything up.Tightly.
Even happiness began to feel unsafe, because what if I showed it at the wrong time? What if I was too happy, too free, too much?
Until the pressure became too much. Then the feelings would erupt—lava-hot and uncontrollable—scorching everything in their path, including the people I loved. The fortress I built to survive eventually became my prison.
It took me until I was about 33 to understand this truth: I wasn’t free.
Every shackle I’d placed on myself in childhood: every belief, every suppression, every mask, I began, slowly, to remove. One by one. Some days I’m still unlocking them. Some days I’m still inside.
Even now, I have moments when I’m flooded with emotion and lose my presence. But my inner warrior, the one I used to silence, she helps bring me back. She’s not fighting my feelings anymore. She’s guiding me through them.
Healing, I’m learning, is not a straight line.It moves like a pendulum, forward and back, rising and falling, learning how to sway with the environment instead of against it.
The work is in noticing the wound, honoring the habits that once protected me, and choosing—again and again—to loosen their hold.
