Ignoring Your Feelings Doesn’t Make You Stronger

We are all so afraid of feeling. We are afraid of sadness. We are afraid of rawness. We hide away our feelings out of fear of the pain that accompanies rejection. We try to shield ourselves from ever being hurt, because we are scared that feeling hurt is a sign of weakness. We try to protect ourselves from feeling the heaviest sides of life by numbing them out; by refusing to feel anything at all.

We think we are saving ourselves from the darkness, but really we are only robbing ourselves of light.

Hardening our edges and thickening our skin doesn’t make us stronger.

It doesn’t save us from anything. It doesn’t protect us from life. Taking away the tears and brushing aside the sadness only steals from us our ability to live and to love deeply. We think that being sensitive is weak. We think that feeling emotions is not worth our while. But if we want to live life in more dimensions, we must embrace our power to feel. We must embrace all of our perceptions and sensations. We must feel every single feeling.

You see, it is sensitivity that will empower you to feel your life through the entire spectrum of emotions. You can’t experience the highest highs unless you have felt the lowest lows. And if you let yourself feel, your highs will be even higher. Your happiness – your sheer, full, moments of blissful happiness – will echo loud and clear. But you have to allow yourself to feel these highs. You have to open your mind and body up to letting feelings come through you like tidal waves of glorious strength. If you allow yourself to be sensitive, the tears won’t all seem so bad. The sadness won’t seem like forever. And you will find that your ability to feel will inspire even more of those pure, perfect moments in which time stands still.

You don’t need to be afraid to feel.

You don’t need to try to hide your feelings. Being sensitive means you are able to feel; and this ability is your greatest strength. It means that you are able to care and love with the utmost depth. It means that you are able to give your heart away to what and to who you love. It means that when you fall for something or someone, you plunge into the deep end, completely enthralled.

Being sensitive means you are okay with putting your heart on your sleeve. It means that you aren’t so afraid of loving a little too much.

I hope that one day you allow yourself to be sensitive. I hope that you find that you deserve to feel feelings deep down to your core, and that you deserve to have infinite experiences that make your heart swell. I hope that you know that you deserve to live a life that spans on for pages and pages, with each page covered gracefully in adventures and beauty.

Most importantly, I hope that one day you embrace your sensitivity, because I don’t want you to resort to living your life in black and white.

I don’t want you to be enveloped by gray when your whole world can be soaked in magnificent color.

I want your world to be painted with deep shades of aqua and dramatic sweeping blurs of red. I want you to be sensitive to the deep sapphire sky enveloping the earth during a gorgeous summer thunderstorm.

I want you to be so sensitive that you will feel the thunder shaking through your core as the world erupts around you in glittering raindrops. I want you to be sensitive to the golden sunlight that gleams down on your sea salt covered skin as you soak in the glorious breeze. I want you to be sensitive to the brilliant shades of emerald green that surround you as you walk delicately through the tree covered trails. I want you to breathe in the scents of the earth and to feel the ground moving away below you.

I hope that you will accept your sensitivity so that you can feel the entire range of feelings that this world has to offer you. I hope you don’t settle for living and loving in black and white. I hope you don’t settle for a life full of what could have beens. I hope you don’t hide yourself away from wonderful, breath-taking moments out of fear of feeling.

I hope that you will cry.

I hope that you will love.

I hope that you live your life in color.