Shadow Work - Writing Prompts for Aquarians Pt. 2.2

 

When have I judged or held back my emotions? (Part 2)

It's weird when you have this sudden realization about something that happened years ago, and you're like, "Huh, that's why I did that!" Honestly, I hold myself back in some way every single day because I have learned it’s safer to keep some parts of myself for myself than share them and get hurt. I do it less as I get older and have slowly separated myself from the people and places that are the most toxic to me. But sometimes I catch myself falling back into old habits.

I remember being in college taking an acting class because it was required for my teaching degree and the profession getting so angry with me. We were  doing a visualization exercise where she would throw things out at us and be like, and then this happened and now this and this ... what do you do? I completed mine, and she just looked at me and said, "You wouldn't react that way. No one does." She poked at me and poked at me and demanded that I would get angry and do this or that like normal angry people do. I looked at two or three other people I knew in the class and told the professor to ask them, they know me. They all agreed with me, I was being pretty true to how I would actually react in a stressful situation.

At that point in my life, I had spent so long around an explosive parent who only got more explosive if you reacted to the instigation, that I could field most stress without any outward reaction. It was a coping mechanism for anxiety and psychological abuse. It was also a silent protest because I refused to feed the chaos by losing my composure. Losing composure was a failure/loss. I can look back and see so many instances like this over and over. I realized it on a surface level when I was about 24, and by 25 I had moved as far away as I could manage. I learned to not only disengage but to be forceful about why I was disengaging and put the ownership for the growing distance where it belonged. It got worse for a while. There were lots of, "You were never like this before. What happened to you? You used to be so soft spoken and kind." The real answer was I used to just bear it to keep the peace, and for the first time I was looking out for my peace. Improvement happened slowly over more than a decade, with a load of setbacks.

Odd how random things just make you go, wow, I'm glad I'm here and now and not then anymore.