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Warning: Naughty language ahead!

I always wanted to open my heart.

But I couldn’t. I didn’t know how. I wouldn’t let myself.

So I tried really hard to go numb—to be aloof, like an elegant apricot-colored cat.

But there’s no such thing as numb.

Because I remember the pulsating waves of emptiness.

The constant, dull ache in my chest.

The shooting stabs of anxiety that would wake me at 4.am., telling me that beneath this shiny exterior, I was a fucking mess.

I wasn’t living the life I wanted to live.

I wasn’t living at all—I was hiding.

Deep down, I knew it.

I was hiding behind thick walls and tall, stony barriers. I was hiding underneath the prickly thorns on my heart that I prayed would protect me from being too vulnerable, from feeling too deeply, too intensely.

But the tears always found me.

Emotions would spill out, like roaring oceans, over the smallest insults and slightest disagreements.

I was a smothered volcano. A suppressed, swirling sea.

My heart was closed. Locked and shut, without a key.

But—life has this funny way of giving us exactly what we need to open.

And one day, when the weather was warm and the trees were just starting to blossom, someone saw right through me—-through my intricate defenses and disguises—and they didn’t judge me.

They hugged me. Tightly. Tenderly.

Down came my walls.

In splashed the tears. I cried for an entire night, in exhausted, pleading sobs.

When the morning sunlight trickled onto my tired, puffy eyes, I had a revelation, only divine in its sweet simplicity:

I am meant to feel.

You are meant to feel. We are all meant to feel.

No, it won’t always be pretty—it’s not supposed to be pretty.

It’s supposed to remind us that we’re alive; that we’re warm-blooded human beings with beating hearts.

We can’t blot out sadness, fear or regret.

We can’t delete despair or love or shame.

We can’t anesthetize our agony.

Feelings will come—whether we like it or not—only growing in strength every second they’re pushed down in the frothy seas of our hearts.

Why not welcome emotion, like we would a thunderstorm on a scorching summer night?

It might hurt to feel, but our hearts are designed for it.

Ou hearts are made to crack and feel and heal—and then break all over again.

It is only through the cracks and breaks that light drips into us.

That truth reaches us.

That wisdom seeps inside, like honey.

Put your hand on your heart and feel its triumphant, steady beating.

Feel its raw tenderness.

It’s beautiful.

Open your cracked, beautiful heart, you beautiful human being,

And let the light in.

Drop your defenses, your hard-shelled protective coatings, and be vulnerable, for once.

Reveal every bruised, battered vein and fragile hairline fracture

Let them all be covered in dappled rays of delicious golden sunlight.

Feel the breeze kiss every part that aches

And listen.

Do you hear it?

The air is alive with the cries of every heart that’s ever been broken.

You are not alone in your aching, in your suffering, in your fear.

You never were.

That’s the magic

Of opening your cracked heart

And letting the light in.

You taste every tear that was ever shed

You feel every ecstatic word and joyous, honey-dipped laugh

You feel love.

And pain.

And realize

It’s all the same.

You breathe in,

Cry,

Surrender

And become

Fully human.

Fully, deliciously

Alive.

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Author: Sarah Harvey

Editor: Caroline Beaton

Photo: Flickr