I’m really struggling with this honesty thing. It feels… emotionally dangerous. It’s not that I’ve blatantly lied. I haven’t. I’ve just stopped sharing so much.
I get it now. I get why people don’t want to openly share their thoughts and feelings, why they hide behind constructed personas and superficial chatter. I don’t want to share either. I’m tired of feeling vulnerable, of hurting. I’m tired of being the only person in a group willing to expose my underbelly, of feeling so incredibly alone when the people around me won’t make eye contact–when their bodies shift uncomfortably in reaction to my openness.
And I sometimes wonder, why am I doing this?
In the past months I’ve made several attempts to write a new blog post only to end up obsessively editing, re-writing and eventually trashing what I had written. Part of this has to do with my way of coping. When life feels rocky and uncertain (as it has these past few months), I withdraw socially and spend most of my time quietly ruminating over every nuance of the life-stuff that’s bothering me. This makes it especially difficult to write publicly.
The other reason is that I’m in a romantic relationship again, and I have so many contrary feelings about it that most times I don’t know what to think. Really, I’m just afraid of getting hurt again. And splashing about my deepest thoughts and feelings here seems like a recipe for relationship failure.
Someone recently asked me if I still think honesty is sexy and whether my life is more peaceful now. Sexy? Yes. Peaceful? Hell no.
