The joy of being (true to) ourselves

 Being yourself is a lot easier when you have all the layers covering you and you feel you can safely hide in them. Being true to unraveling all the layers is being true to your vulnerability that made you want to hide in the first place and why. Maybe there is no straight answer why but hiding your pain, emotional (even if you are physically hurt, it's your emotions that take a lot longer to heal) mostly is to safeguard the authentic juice or essence of being oneself and stay away from acknowledging it. Numbing this acknowledgement or repressing becomes a habit owing to having to cope up with the emotional/physical abuse and not letting it out for fear of being perceived as weak. 

And so not feeling safe enough to be your natural self and even before understanding what that could be, the amount of trust we place on others opinions of us becomes our conditioning that we levy on ourselves as if we tune into proving to others from then on, even from childhood days, that others are right at the cost of feeling all messed up from inside - it's like suspending our belief in ourselves in order to enable their judgements, no matter how criticism oriented it could be or how emotionally immature or insensitive or toxic it could be, but just plainly second guessing ourselves over and over just to give the benefit of doubt because they are family and that they will not mean any harm or belittle, compare, guilt us for no real fault of ours, but they do, and make us silent empathizers by practice - by making us practice as we unconsciously start doing so from a very young age and start assuming that we will never be as good as they want us to be and so to hide this pain that it's better to be adjustable with limiting ourselves, absorbing their energies and mood swings completely and not have any room, any space within us that we can call is for ourselves and completely dishonor boundary setting for ourselves as that thought of setting boundaries doesn't even arise let alone express the need for it. The abuser's toxic becomes part of us as we take comfort in the darkness of such a misguided and lost reality - the reality that we are important as well and that our needs, wants, feelings and so on need to be prioritized and even if it happens later in later, it's still worth it because at least then we will know the real pain of not knowing ourselves enough and not being kind enough with ourselves as we individually deserve that irrespective of what others think.

The stories we tell ourselves just to make ourselves feel more accepted in the lives of others is the most emotional wounding that we continue to sustain and live with and not even feel the extent of numbness that has layered like moss on stagnant waters. 

And so to come out of this cave, this self imposed isolation owing to abandoning ourselves for the need of circumstances needs to be relooked into. Darkness can make us turn away as there's nothing much that we can discover in the absence of light, but continuing to deepen our search that we will find our true self lurking in the deep crevices of the cave is a flickering hope to hold onto. Broken we maybe upon finding pieces of our true selves scattered without a linear thread of meaning and purpose behind it, but it's the fractured pieces if we own up to and acknowledge their presence in us despite the brokenness, then we make way to return to our true self with total integrity. Because it's not the gaining what we have lost and how much we have lost ourselves that matters, it's the letting go what we cannot fix anymore or what we cannot control anymore, and simply accepting over and over until we learn to hear our own painful truths with courage and equally kindness that we are really worth all the time to self explore and go in this inner journey to reclaim the joy of being ourselves.