If I said it’s been a while I’d be far from honest and only trying to kid myself to make myself feel better. 

It’s been well over a year since I’ve written. And I wondered why. Wondering rather than shaming myself or burying it to feel better…conning myself to feel better. 

Wondering and up rose the truth. I’ve been hiding. Hiding my heart. A heart that was operated on this time last year, a physically wounded heart. I knew it was bigger than the simple, yet terrifying, operation. Psychically something alien, no natural to help my heart. A damaged heart. There is heart disease in my family yet I know a lifestyle full of drugs didn’t help. A grief arose. A grief that brought me face to face with my own self destruction. And I ran from facing this.

My truth too painful; that I’d been killing myself. Yet I know this is because it was too brutally painful to live. 

So vulnerable. Yet my vulnerability is my strength. And it was so hard to stand in this place, to date greatly. New arrivals in my life quietly saying no, I won’t accept your vulnerability. Afraid, a wounded heart, shame for having wounded my own heart, a child within broken hearted because again he wasn’t being accepted…and I closed down my heart, tried to fit in by hiding me. 

Over a year later I know to hide is to break my own heart. 

Yes, the majority of humans are terrified of another’s vulnerability. I know that place well, know I’d have criticised, shamed, judged to shut up anyone who dared to make me feel uncomfortable because they had the courage to dare to be vulnerable. And that is the crux. We shut other’s vulnerability down because we are terrified of our own. 

I’ve shut down to try to fit in, be accepted. To be acceptable to someone else so I might get their approval. So I’ve buried myself behind cigarettes, sugar, caffeine. Hid myself to ‘you’ might like me. But it backfired. Being inauthentic is exhausting, miserable, full of disappointment. Self prescribed disappointment. 

So I’m choosing to write again. From here I know I’ll remember more who I am, not who the ‘you’ who is terrified of their own vulnerability wants me to be.

I owe it to myself, not you.