I have been told many times that I am too emotional, that I should keep my emotions 'inside' to protect myself from my heart being 'too open', or over-sharing. I was told this so often I became afraid of the judgement of others that I would be seen as fragile, soft, lacking personal control and inner resilience. I spent so much time polishing the image of myself in other people's eyes to be what they, and I could accept.
This kind of judgement and my inability to meet these social norms lead me to doubt myself to the point of needing to take anti-anxiety/anti-depressant medication. I believed for a long time that the way I expressed my experience of living was at least in part a serious mental health issue. I considered it a disability and something to hide from others if I could.
Not being socially accepted is it's own kind of trauma. Being rejected for being expressive is painful. Now that I'm weaning off psychotherapeutic medication I noticed within days how emotionally vibrant I naturally was. I noticed straight away how life touches me quite deeply. How I can cry and laugh so easily and how the medication I had been taking had been dampening my expression of what it means to me to be alive. And this old fear came into my mind was I just 'too much'?
I wonder, is there an 'inside' to contain my emotional life in, and an outside that I project to the wider world, or is this just an old, unchallenged belief? Perhaps a belief that my personhood has boundaries and a shape, a landscape that ends like a forest that opens into a clearing. The open clearing is calm and appreciated, but the wild forest is not. Just as we believe the heart is either open or closed, our belief about how the heart emotionally operates is developed in the mind. To me the heart isn't really open or closed, just as there is no inside or outside the self, this is just something we believe in to explain barriers or boundaries we have built in our minds. Like a map with territories, states and countries.
These constructs of inside and outside, heart open or closed explain the boundaries we've agreed to, that restrict our experience and expression of the present moment in order to be socially acceptable, and maybe to accept ourselves. I can now see, when people become uncomfortable with my level of emotional expression they are confronted with the mental constructs they've agreed to. And respectfully I don't have to agree with these standards of being. I am actually free.
These mental beliefs are heavy walls that limit the amount of love we experience and express. These walls that we create in order to be accepted can contribute to the mental ill health of ourselves and others. I use to think that life was about developing and perfecting the self, but I think that was a mistake. Life seems bigger and brighter and much more about perfecting our loving qualities. A lifetime of work...
So if you also feel you are 'too much' for some people, no judgement of them will help but no anxiety about myself will either. To express life fully is to be alive in a wonderous sense, and I don't believe I should alter or apologise for the sense of awesomeness I sometimes feel, or the depth of sadness or confusion when it touches me. Life is a multi-coloured wheel of light, there is nothing wrong with each and every colour except as we believe it to be.
'Some people care too much, I think it's called love' Winnie the Pooh
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