guarded heart.

I was talking to some friends earlier this week, and came to realize how self-conscious I tend to be when it comes to the hidden things of my heart. I never truly had healthy models in understanding and regulating my own feelings growing up, nor have I truly allowed my heart to live and thrive within the healthy boundaries of community and well-rounded interpersonal relationships. Perhaps because of this, I’ve learnt to keep my heart at a distance, and grown comfortable in hiding the very intimate and honest spaces of me, away from public view.

I have always been told that I was far mature for my years, and my past self has always learnt to look to that as a compliment. Lately though, as I’ve built an awareness for the things I’ve come to walk through and experienced, I’ve begun to lament my maturity as a mourning for the child-like spaces I had to outgrow quickly and quietly. As my parents were taught to fend for themselves at a young age, so to did I learn to do the same. It remains to this day something I have to constantly choose to actively work around with great intentionality to counter. I’ve naturally gone with the perceptions of those around me, and presented a view of myself that I know people naturally want to see. While I could care less of how I wish to be painted, the reality is such that it is much easier to finish a half-painted drawing, than it is to rework an entire canvas.

My lines have always been my excuse for keeping people at bay, and creating that negative space between my heart and the world around me, has perhaps led me to be naturally afraid of my own authenticity when sharing space with others. It isn’t to say, that I haven’t lived within the authenticity of what I wanted to create for myself before, but I’ve come to embrace and understand that true authenticity requires a greater intentionality on my part, and for that, I am grateful for the time I have been able to let my heart be and rest with its feelings. Yet within the same way distance has protected my heart, it has also protected others from it.

Through perhaps the side-effects of my own resilience, I’ve come to realize that I have a tendency to inadvertently numb my own feelings (and of others as well). As an empath, unhinged, I am aware of how naturally and equally destructive my emotions and heart can be, especially since it has grown to live and fend for itself in equally large spaces of grief and hurt. The seesaw between indifference and a constant need to care, has always left me exhausted, and often times, I’ve given up the idea of selectively tuning out the world, to wholly tuning out the world. The scariest part of the process has always been how easy it is to not see the things we’d rather not choose to see, and how easy it can be to train ourselves in not holding the capacity to feel. The isolation of the last year has made the indifference easier, and the cynicism larger. The work has grown harder with each passing day, to remind myself of the spaces of accountability that I hold myself up to with high regard. Yet even so, I am reminded through the struggle of an acquired truth. That compassion grown through trial, becomes the strongest form of love that anyone can hope to accomplish.

The greatest lesson I’ve learnt throughout my wrestle within my history of abuse hasn’t been a revelation on the nature of forgiveness, but of learning to let the hate go. As simple as this may sound, the people we hate often times aren’t worth our time to do so. I am aware that situations are more complicated to reduce such an idea of hate down to, but by engaging with hate towards the people who deserve our hate, we unintentionally end up imprinting with continuity, a stamp of something that has long disappeared from our lives. Maybe it is naive for me to say, that it would be perhaps more purposeful and beautiful to cultivate in such tangent to hate, a wild compassion in love for spaces bigger than our own. That we choose to make the best of our seasoned stories, not because we necessarily want to, but perhaps because, it’s within our best interests, and the interest of others, to do so.

The last few years have taught me to slowly but surely bring down the barricades of my heart, but I am wholeheartedly aware that the deepest of my work is only just beginning. It is hard to constantly wrestle the automation of action and propagation of trauma that comes with my varied emotional triggers, even as I grow in my awareness of what they are, and where they inadvertently come from. While they have dissipated over the years, they never truly go away. Yet, I hold hope to the promise that I will get there one day, as we all hopefully do, to see the fullness of ourselves carried within our outstretched authenticity, covering and growing towards, like a plant to the sun, the spaces and places we want to inhabit.