What I Had Quieted

The parts of myself I learned to hide.

Last year, during a session with one of my mentors, we were guided through a visualization about judgment and persecution.

Within minutes, I was crying. And I don't mean a few quiet tears. I was sobbing.

I felt small, scared and ashamed. I wanted to disappear.

At first, I assumed something from my childhood had been triggered. But as I sat with what was coming up, I realized I knew exactly when I'd last felt that way.

And it was only a few years earlier.

During a deeply divisive time in the world, I spoke openly about what I believed and made choices that felt right for me. Those choices cost me relationships, professional connections, opportunities I cared about, and eventually, even my job.

Whatever anyone believes about that period isn't really the point of this story. What I've come to recognize is how deeply those experiences affected me, and how much of that I carried forward without even realizing it.

Somewhere along the way, I'd come to believe that being fully seen wasn't safe.

I've always been sensitive, introverted and a little different. I've experienced and perceived things throughout my life that weren't always easy to explain, and I'd learned early on to be careful about which parts of myself I shared with others.

But after those experiences, I became even more guarded.

I started questioning myself before I spoke, second-guessing how my words might be received, and keeping certain beliefs and experiences to myself. I tucked the spiritual and intuitive parts of me further out of sight, even though they were some of the most meaningful parts of who I was.

And the strange thing is, I didn't really recognize what I was doing. I told myself I was being discerning, protecting my energy, choosing more carefully who I shared myself with.

Around that time, I wrote something in my journal that I recently came across again.

Maybe if I'm invisible, I can't be rejected. Maybe if I'm silent, I won't be abandoned.

Oof.

Reading those words now, I can see just how much fear had been influencing my choices.

For a long time, I called all of this discernment. And sometimes it genuinely was. There are parts of ourselves and our experiences that we don't need to share with everyone.

But sometimes, I was just scared shitless of being judged again.

I'm learning there's a difference between keeping something private because it feels sacred and hiding because you're afraid of how other people will respond. And I'm still discovering where that line is for me.

What became painfully clear was how often I'd been protecting myself from other people's rejection by rejecting parts of myself first.

I'd learned to abandon parts of myself in an effort to avoid being abandoned by others.

And that was a difficult realization to sit with.

Especially because so much of my own journey, and the work I now share with others, has been about recognizing the ways we abandon ourselves in order to feel safe, accepted and loved.

I could see how easily I'd slipped back into an old way of protecting myself. One that had probably served me well at different points in my life, but was now keeping me from expressing myself as fully and freely as I wanted to.

And I think that's something worth acknowledging about this whole journey of remembering and reclaiming ourselves.

We can have years of awareness, understanding and personal growth behind us and still discover places where we're living from old fears. Sometimes we don't even recognize it until something brings it to the surface.

That's certainly been true for me.

I've spent much of my life exploring consciousness, spirituality, the soul, and the unseen aspects of our existence. My relationship with God and Spirit, my intuitive and psychic abilities, and the experiences that have shaped my understanding of this world are deeply woven into who I am.

Yet I'd become increasingly careful about how openly I expressed those parts of myself.

And I'm tired of doing that.

I'm tired of filtering myself through what I think other people will accept or understand. I'm tired of questioning whether I should share something simply because it falls outside someone else's understanding of the world.

I know that some people won't resonate with my beliefs or experiences. Some will question them, and others may judge me for them.

I can live with that.

I don't need everyone to believe what I believe, and I have no desire to convince anyone that my experience of the world should be theirs.

But I do want to be able to express who I am without feeling that I have to apologize for it.

So I'm beginning to let those parts of myself back out. To speak more openly about my spirituality, my relationship with God and the unseen, my intuitive abilities, and the things I've come to understand through my own experiences.

And to trust that I can be misunderstood, disagreed with, or even rejected without losing myself in the process.

I imagine there will still be moments when I hesitate, when that old fear creeps in and I find myself wondering whether it's safer to stay quiet.

I'm human, after all.

But I'm becoming more aware of those moments, and I'm learning that I have a choice in how I respond to them.

Because I don't want to look back on my life and realize how much of myself I kept hidden out of fear of what other people might think.

I've spent enough of my life making myself smaller.

And I wonder how many of us have done the same, often without even realizing it.

How many parts of ourselves have we quietly tucked away because somewhere along the way, we learned they weren't welcome?

And what might happen if we began allowing those parts of ourselves to be seen again?