I Live Inside My Head
At a young age, I learned to live inside my head. My own emotions and thoughts had to be kept within. To survive my environment, I learned to read others to know how to think and feel. Then I would act according to those readings.
I learned to hide my emotions well. Though, when I did so, I tucked them away and didn’t deal with them. When they would finely surface, I wouldn’t know why I was angry or crying, it would just come out of me and I was unable to stop it from flowing.
When I was about 14 I discovered poetry and that became my outlet. When those emotions hit me, I would write a poem. Through my writing, the reasoning’s of those emotions would be revealed to me. It was only a way for me to understand why, so that I could deal with them better. I rarely kept anything I wrote. Instead I would tear it up beyond recognition so that I couldn’t be exposed.
In my later teen years, I discovered journaling. Instead of throwing it away, I hid the notebook well. I found that I liked looking back to see how I evolved. Of course, not throwing away each time I wrote turned out to be a mistake. When I was 18 my mother found one of my notebooks. It happened to be during one of her manic times and I suffered a 4 hour lecture, her attempting to set me straight on how I should feel and think. Soon after that, I moved in with who eventually become my husband. I guess I could say he saved me from a bad home life.
My husband was very understanding, yet my inability to communicate in words affectively would drive him crazy. A lot of times, I would write them on paper and he’d read them. As time passed, I learned to communicate my emotions affectively with spoken words, but I’ve always had to step away and think first.
I still cannot just talk about things right away. I have to step away and figure out why I feel a certain way. As you can imagine, this can be misunderstood by a lot of people. It often looks like avoidance, but in reality I just don’t really know. I have to step away to find the answer. So, this survival mechanism of turning off my emotions and living inside my own head is also a handicap for me.
This is why this site has become so addictive for me. It’s much easier for me to express my thoughts and emotions in written form, rather than spoken. It’s also nice being able to express it and have others read it so that I’m not dealing with aspects totally alone.
Many of you may get angry when you read this, but another aspect that makes this site so appealing is that I can expose all of myself through my writing, then when I want to throw it away like I did with my earlier poetry, I can just delete my account. Those in my circle may know my face from my pictures, but even that would fade with enough time.
Many of you have expressed how open I seem to be, but the reality is that if you met me in person, you would not feel that way. Most people have described me as someone that is very difficult to read. It’s even kept me from developing a lot of close intimate friendships in life.
So, I was going to take a break from this site, but I need a writing outlet. Though, you will not see me on here nearly as much. Staying on here all the time is just as bad as living in my own head too much. Like most things when it is done in excess, it is unhealthy.
