“I am grateful for the courage to fully feel my feelings and to keep being vulnerable through it all.”

I was writing this morning and that came up.

For most of my life I never let myself be vulnerable. I never truly felt my feelings. I hid them in a busy schedule or new project. I pushed them down because God forbid I be “emotional”, the guys best friend girl isn’t emotional, don’t you know that?

I was always told how strong I was. People would always compliment me on my ability to stay strong, move forward, heal after being knocked down in some really ugly ways over the years. So that’s what I became, strong. I became the strong one. The one who didn’t let things get to her. The one who always had everything under control. The one who smiled anyway.

And I’m not degrading that or taking any power away from that ability that I have because for most of my life, it absolutely served me. It helped me build. It showed me the way. It created some super solid things within me that I may have never learned or knew without those automatic reactions I had learned to use time after time to “be okay”.

Today through, that identity no longer serves me.

Am I strong? Absolutely.
Am I resilient? In more ways than I could ever begin to explain.
Am I emotional? Yes. And not in the negative way that most people label women when they say they are feeling all of their feelings.

I believe that by living the way I did for so long, mixed with all of the work I’ve done on myself over the past 5 years I can be courageous and emotional and vulnerable every single day. I can feel all of my feelings and not load them on other people. I can feel them for myself and know what is mine and what is not. I can sort through them, sit with them, honor them, and not cling to them for my existence or my identity. Most importantly, I can learn from them without falling apart.

Do I fall apart? Sure. Sometimes, and usually in the bath if we’re being honest.

But it’s not a bad thing. It’s nothing to feel sorry for or embarrassed about. It’s necessary to process through the feelings that come up. It take courage to allow yourself to feel and face all of the emotions that come up for you. It takes strength and patience and grace too.

Living a courageous life is not for the faint of heart. It’s not always easy but let me tell you with absolute certainty that I have never felt more powerful in my entire existence than I do now, now that I’ve made it my lifestyle to allow my feelings, to own them, and to honor them.

Life is truly a beautiful thing and learning to allow has opened it up to being even more breathtakingly beautiful than I could have ever imagined.