It is a crampy day in my body, and it is raining outside. Inside, I feel this delectable smorgasbord of acceptance and disappointment, inspiration and pain, relief and anger, love and fear, joy and suffering. The feelings within me seem immense and indescribable, truly, and yet I sit here and still my expression on the outside somehow describes them. Our actions – our very presentation of ourselves to the world – always describe our inner world and emotions, don’t they? It’s when we don’t express authentically on the outside – when we choose to restrain them – that the emotions aren’t described. Then, we are alone with them. They are trapped within us, neglected as we are, for rather than allowing them to describe us, to voice themselves, they have no choice but to become trapped and starved – even cannibalistic within our bodies and our spirits. They sink in, unheard, and sink their teeth onto our kidneys, our hearts, our muscles, our thoughts.

Are there parts of me I’ve left undescribed? Feelings I’ve abandoned that have been forced to cling onto me, who want to be free but are forced to latch on for lack of an exit, for lack of acceptance and of love?

For me, it has been perhaps just the very core essence of my being, that’s all… The immense feelings I spoke of. The depth of emotion itself that I have insisted many times on holding back from others. The expansiveness of my inner world and its aliveness that I have been afraid to describe outside of me for fear that its description would fall on deaf ears. For fear that I would be misunderstood, that I would be rejected and deemed as unlovable as I felt. That I would turn away anyone who was considering loving me, accepting me – that I would scare them away with the very weight of me.

That has been the fear of my life. The fear that my true expression is so alien and heavy that anyone who might receive it speaks an entirely different language – so much so that they would flee in the other direction at the mere sound of the one that comes from me. That I be left standing alone in a dark room for my entire life, comforted only by the sound of my own shrill and foreign voice.

So I became. I became watered down. A poor and artificial reflection of my authentic expression, broken up by wind strewn ripples on the surface of the river I peered over – the river of the faces of anyone happened to be standing around me. Influenced to whittle myself down, or build outwards, maybe I should say. To add layers upon layers so that my surface would resemble theirs. So that the reflection of me would look more human – so that I could hopefully, if by some feat born from my back and soul-breaking labor – I could be loved. It didn’t even matter if I was truly loved, though I wouldn’t openly admit it to myself. It only mattered that I fit myself into their puzzle in whatever way they would have me – whatever way I could squeeze in. I just needed the love.

I needed it because I had a darkness inside of me, a place that I trapped those held back descriptions, a place where they sank in and became dis-ease in my body and in my spirit. I wasn’t allowing light to reach there. It was too raw. I was shielding it from access to the light because I believed it unworthy. I believed that if no one outside of me could show it love, then it didn’t deserve my own. I learned to bury and bury and bury until I was a shell covered in dead soil – where nothing could grow – and my being was so fragmented that when I emerged on occasion, I didn’t even recognize myself in the mirror anymore. In fact, eventually I had rejected myself for so long that I couldn’t even remember what I really looked like. I was lost to myself entirely.

I searched to figure it out from the outside in, thinking that would quell the longing, satisfy the gaping darkness inside of me. I sunk money into the hole – investing in my own fears and self-hatred. I tried on different styles of clothing and personalities, staring at my distorted reflection and asking myself whether my purchases yet made me lovable, whether they made me human, whether they finally made me a version of me that I could live with within the constraints of acceptability. The sinkhole was unsatisfied, unfilled, for it could never be filled. Not by the things I was trying to fill it with. It was a gaping wound, and I was festering it instead of tending to it and allowing it to truly heal.

All it could do was grow, sinking deeper, along with it any opportunity I had for true companionship, for truly being seen, truly being loved. Inside, the darkness was begging desperately for the light that I was shielding it from – it was begging for a love that only I could give it.

First came awareness of this shielding, and the gift of awareness ushered in a raining of brightness so nourishing that I’ve begun to recognize myself again. The light of my spirit seeps through my pores and grows stronger with every moment that I allow it to see itself clearly.

I see myself now as the river itself. The reflections on the river’s surface have nothing to do with me and everything to do with whoever is gazing into the water. We become unrecognizable to ourselves when we begin to rely on the reflections of those other people to tell us who we are. It is only when we gift our inner darknesses our awareness – our own love – that we can remove impurities from our sense of self and know ourselves fully. With that knowing, we have access to flow through our lives with ease, clarity, and stillness of mind, body, and spirit.