The Wall Around Your Heart–Post #1

I wanted to share with you again where I started from.  This was my first post over a year ago.  Thanks for hanging in there with me!

We’re all born totally dependent. As we grow, people who love us help us learn how to walk, talk, feed ourselves, tie our shoelaces, and many other things. We have no choice but to be vulnerable because we can’t do anything for ourselves. Eventually, we grow up enough to have a choice.

At some point in our lives, we become self-conscious about how others see us and we start building walls around our hearts to keep them from being hurt. We dress and act to conform to others’ idea of what we should look like and how we should behave in order to be ‘acceptable’ to the group. We play make-believe and hope no one notices what a fraud we are. If we do this long enough, we often can’t figure out how to escape the fraud we think we have become.

Every time we open ourselves up, we are vulnerable, and once we learn that others can use our vulnerabilities against us—in a frenzy to be liked, accepted, or just not to be hurt and humiliated—we build that wall a little higher. The wall is what we let most people see. The heart is reserved for the special few, and even they don’t always get to see it all.

Now is the time to deconstruct that wall. Whatever your age—whether you’re sixteen or sixty—now is the best time to find your truths and own yourself. When you start to find your true self again, the one you were before you started to build your wall, you give yourself the possibility of embracing yourself, loving yourself, and sharing the gift of you with the world.

I want to share with you a part of myself I thought was lost. I wrote this in high school when I was fourteen or fifteen. Somewhere along the road of life, it disappeared. On visits home when I was grown, I’d hunt for it in the attic in papers I’d left behind and in books I’d abandoned long ago. I’d remembered the feeling of it but not the words. As we were cleaning out the house after my father died, I found it in his papers. I love him for that gift.

This is how our walls gets started.  Wear a tie.  Draw something else.  Be someone else.  The message we receive is “You’re not good enough just as you are”, or “If you want to be accepted, you have to be like everyone else”.  But I don’t believe that and I hope you don’t either.  You are enough.  Being your own unique, quirky self has so many rewards.  The world needs all the good things we each have to offer in order to be whole.

I want you to feel alive inside.  I want your gifts to be acknowledged and shared.  I want you to discover who you were meant to be.  I truly believe we each have been given unique gifts and that these gifts, when sent out into the world, can change it for the better.  Let’s tear down that wall you’ve built around your heart.  Here, we can be real and be appreciated for it.  You don’t have to shine your light all at once.  Just let a little bit shine out and see how it feels.  Then, let’s walk a while and talk about it.

Is there something you love doing that you stopped doing because of what others might think of you?  How high is your wall?  Try to recall what caused you to start building it and share it with us!