“She wore a thousand faces all to hide her own.” ~ Atticus

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I am feeling drained energetically, emotionally, and physically.

The truth is, being in the world overwhelms me. I’m highly sensitive, heavily introverted, overly empathetic, and socially anxious. You’re likely to find me hiding behind the comfort of the familiar—said familiarity being my room, of course.

I feel everything—deep down to my core. I soak it all up. All of it.

My body aches, and I decide to heed its call—I take a desperately needed soul day. I draw the curtains and retreat from the world. The truth is that I enjoy solitude—the sacred safety of the familiar. There’s much less to anticipate and control.

I am safe here in my sanctuary. I pick up my phone in an attempt to distract myself. While I scroll through the apparitions of lives on my Facebook feed, something finally clicks.

I’m not hiding from the world; I’m hiding from myself.

We all are hiding in some way or another. Some hide behind fear, filters, or familiarity. Others behind silence, substances, or self-importance.

We all have some aspect of ourselves that we’re hiding out of guilt, fear, or shame.

But, by doing this, we no longer have the ability to recognize those parts of ourselves in others. The parts that we deem to be unacceptable are precisely the parts that make us relatable—recognizably human. 

Our hiding robs us of the ability to be seen, and life can’t be lived from the sidelines.

We’ve been invisible for far too long.

It’s time to disconnect, re-connect gently, and turn inward to greet ourselves.

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We yearn to be seen, but we hide away in fear.
We create avatars as substitutes for the people we think we ought to be.
Try as we might, we cannot escape the fact that we’ve been led down the garden path.
These apparitions of lives are not our lives—
the need for acceptance has kept us invisible in the world.

We have chipped away parts of ourselves that we deem to be unacceptable,
no longer able to recognise those parts in others—
We’re polished like stone, yet rigidly alone.
Disconnected from the earth…
from ourselves.
We have lost our humanity, empathy, and the courage to be vulnerable.

It’s time that we disconnect,
re-connect,
embrace the world with open arms,
and ever so gently, turn inward
to greet ourselves in the sacred, silent, offline space.

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Relephant:

3 Steps for Embracing the Parts of us we Hate.

Why we Hate Looking at ourselves in the Mirror.

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Author: Kira Keulemans
Image: WikiMedia Commons
Editor: Yoli Ramazzina
Copy Editor: Callie Rushton
Social Editor: Waylon Lewis