Facing Yourself Is Scary But It’s Worth It
It’s the last few steps after you’ve been walking for hours. You know you’re almost home, but it would feel good to stop right here and just rest. The last few steps seem to always be the hardest.
You can feel it. You’re learning how to feel again. It’s long, it’s exhausting, and it doesn’t happen until you stop closing the door on the hard stuff.
You have to welcome the feelings. Open the door, usher them in, serenade them with a playlist that lasts for months and get really comfortable knowing they aren’t going anywhere until you work it out.
It’s realizing you can’t hold the screams inside any longer. You can’t sit quiet as a mouse while inside your heart there’s a tornado ripping through your every thought. That’s not living, that’s slowly and silently dying.
Emotions can become weapons if you let them. That’s what you realize just before you decide it’s easier to not feel them. People, situations, and expectations can make you feel a certain way; until they can’t. Then you find yourself in a tower claiming protection.
What happens next is the scary part: you’re numb. Avoiding anything that might tip the scale towards any certain feeling. Good or bad, it doesn’t matter.
Why do we stay locked in the tower if we know the door is unlocked?
Because it’s easier. We all know that. Because it means accepting that while you were trying to protect yourself from the dragons on the outside, your mind became the scariest dragon of them all. Who knew we could create monsters with our own minds?
But you’re worth the battle of slaying the dragons—even the ones in your head.
It’s long, it’s exhausting. But slowly you’ll realize how to fully feel again. It might be hard, but you’ll be able to feel how hard it is, and that is proof that you’ve won the battle.