On Honesty, and Choosing to Share

I've never been particularly prone to pouring my heart out. Even as a child I kept my thoughts and emotions closely guarded, perhaps allowing one or two to see what I was really thinking or feeling. At the time it wasn’t something I acknowledged, it was even something I was aware of: the natural choice was to keep quiet and stay unnoticed.

In my therapy sessions earlier this year, I discovered this perpetuated the ‘good girl’ mentality I had grown up to hang my character on, which saw me through much of my teenage years and early adult life. I was the one who got the good grades, I was the one who behaved and always followed the rules, and I was never, never unprepared. I had to be the good girl, because in my mind there was no other option; who’d want to be the bad girl?

And then there came a moment I couldn’t have known was coming, and for the first time I felt the wind rush beneath my feet, I looked down from this great height and began to plummet, and there was nothing I could do about it.

The good girl mentality continued after the fall, but it had been broken, and I didn’t know how to fix the shattered fragments of what had been left behind. Again, I kept my mouth closed, resisted opening up, because that was weakness, that wasn’t the character the world had come to know.

Then one day, around eight or nine months ago, I realised that in doing this, I had become afraid of happiness. I actively prevented myself from feeling any kind of positive emotion, because I was scared that I didn’t deserve it, and that it would be balanced out by something negative, something unwelcomed and ultimately - the biggest fear of all - something unexpected.

Over the past few months, I’ve shared tiny snatched moments of my story, and that has been enough. I’ve never shared details of the trauma I experienced just over three years ago that triggered this healing process, and right now I’m still not ready to do so, but what I do feel ready for, is to allow a little more honesty to seep into my words. Choosing to begin this journey awoke a primal urge to share this truth, albeit from a distance. Nothing I have shared comes from the raw place of fear - though of course, this still lingers beneath the surface - it comes from the desire to arm myself with alternatives: strength, passion, courage.

This isn’t the approach that my teenage self would have recommended, and in fact I’m sure she would have made a judgement on this new-found openness, and yet perhaps this is exactly what would have set her free all those years ago. Perhaps this is how I can change my own path, with support and the knowledge that no matter what else, I’m not hiding behind that good girl any longer.