If you were a child who expressed feelings in proportion to those around you. If you contorted your emotions into the shape and size that could be held. If you disappeared and squeezed and repressed what couldn’t.
If your role as a young person was to take care of other people’s feelings, to hold them in your small hands, to weave them into the fabric of your family, to make the unokay acceptable.
You might struggle to believe your feelings are worthy of care. You might struggle to believe there is space for you. You might struggle to believe that your feelings get to exist, regardless of another’s capacity to hold them.
If this is your work, know that it is not yours alone. So many of us are untangling and re-working and weaving these old threads. We are wilting before we remember it’s safe now to bloom. We are foresaking our feelings as a precious survival strategy. We are flashbacking deep in our bones to other times our whole selves weren’t held.
And still. We are showing up in these news ways, trembling. Be gentle in your ferocity: this takes time.