“Life is not about protecting yourself”
Your post today, especially the segment I quoted above, opened a door in my mind for me to realize I could now articulate the following. This is kind of big step for me, as detailed below.

When I moved from NC where I attended a small, private, Christian academy run my church, to GA and started attending sixth grade at a public school, it was a rude awakening to the “real world”. Over the next few years and through high school, I foolishly developed an ideology that if I don’t feel, then I can’t be hurt. I like to think I ran a decent cover about what was really going on inside, but looking back, I probably wasn’t as fiendishly clever as I thought I was at the time.

Over those seven years I did a pretty good job at stunting my inner emotional growth all in the name of trying to protecting myself. Oh, how I wish I could go back to that sixth grade version of myself and convince him that it’s OK to be vulnerable, to feel, to be open to emotional hurt from others. Because the opposite is also true. In the name of preventing others from having the power to hurt or reject me, I also crippled my ability to let people pour love and care and positivity into my life and accept who I am.

It wasn’t until I left for college that I realized that the path I was on was not one that was working for me. Despite my best efforts to not feel so others couldn’t hurt me, I did, as after all, I’m human. My “road to recovery” began then. I slooooowly started to open myself up to new people, new possibilities, new pieces of life I’d previously shut myself off from. A somewhat amusing byproduct of all this is that these days, when I feel, boy, I feel. It’s like a backlog of emotion that wants out. Unfortunately, being half a childhood behind in learning how to process those emotions, well, makes for some awkward, frustrating, and, once in a while, amusing times.

All this is not something I’ve not really shared before. I think I’ve only ever told one or two people, but I’m sharing in the open in the hopes that someone, somewhere won’t repeat my mistake. I’m still having to work hard at to this day to not turtle up inside at times and I’ve had some successes and backsliding over the years. I’m not great at this whole being vulnerable thing or being able to share my emotions or accept myself and whatnot. However, bit by bit, year by year, I’m getting better. What keeps me going is knowing that with the bad, the hurt, the rejection, comes a whole lot of good, nurturing love from those who genuinely accept me. 🙂