What is it like to be unable to share how you feel?
The questions that people ask you or you ask someone tells very little of you, On the other hand, the answers you give or get back tells a lot. When was the last time you answered in detail/ truly to someone asked you “How was your day?” If you always or mostly talk about it honestly, good for you! But those who just can’t get past “It was good” or “It was okay”, unable to share anything that’s bothering you, keep reading ahead, this article is for you.
It is hard to express how you feel for a variety of reasons, fear of being judged, not enough attention, feeling that the thoughts are safe inside your head, or hell! just not finding the right words to express your feeling. Surprisingly it is never the good news that is difficult to express to others.
On the whole, it is caring about other peoples’ opinions way too much or feeling that nobody is interested or bothered about this information they have got to share leads some to keep their feelings to themselves. This bottling up of emotions do not help the person in any way.
Living up with bottled up emotion means making your own conclusions for every emotion you keep to yourself. For example, if you haven’t talked to your best friend lately, and find it hard to tell it to them that you are feeling left out, you bottling up this means you are probably going to assume that they have found better friends and don’t need you anymore while actually they just might have lost your contact, or got busy which you might have known had you talked to them about it. Similarly, such bottled up emotions often have negative conclusions that might be in stark contrast to reality. All these conclusions you draw mostly put you under the bus, or makes you feel smaller. Hence, your self-esteem also takes a huge hit in this process, making you extremely fragile and insecure, with depression and anxiety being very close cousins who visit you often.
Living up with bottled up emotions takes a huge toll on your body and mind, thus making you an easily irritable person, which might also take a toll on your social circle thus leading to more bottling up. Ironically, you might be perceived as the most stuck-up or stubborn person while in reality, you are just too fragile to let anyone break your defenses and share your feelings with.
For all the trouble you have in expressing, you are too good a listener who can listen to others problems and also suggest and help them in finding solutions, while this does make you feel good about yourself, it can actually make or break things for you. As you develop quite a good rapport with someone, they might also expect you to share your feelings with them — which you don’t.. thus, it might make them feel left out if they haven’t understood you well.
The negative thoughts about yourself, the incredibly low self-esteem and self-confidence all lead you to keep doing something that has tangible positivity surrounding it, like being a part of NGO, taking part in the donation drive, etc. so that it makes you feel good about yourself and that’s why humor is a very integral part of your mask so that you can hide every other emotion under this one and also broaden your social circle (cuz who doesn’t like a funny person?)
Photo by theCEOkid on Unsplash
No, this post is not about telling you how to overcome it, or how to deal with it, it just about sharing the pain that you are going through just to let you know that you aren’t alone in this. You got this.
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