The Little Girl Who Felt Everything

 The Little Girl Who Felt Everything

Somewhere between growing up and surviving, I learned to shut my feelings down.

When I was a little girl, I was extremely sensitive.

I felt everything.

If something hurt my feelings, I cried. If something made me angry, I cried. If I was frustrated and didn't know what to do with those feelings, I cried.

And I think part of the problem was that I didn't have anywhere to put all those emotions.

Growing up in an old-fashioned Black Southern family as the oldest of twelve children, I was expected to be responsible long before I was ready.

I remember getting punished when I was maybe eight or ten because my sister set the bathroom trash bin on fire.

My sister and I were only eleven months apart.

Eleven months!

But apparently, those eleven months made me responsible for her actions.

I was angry because it wasn't fair. But I accepted it because that's what I had been taught to do.

I didn't want to be responsible for everybody.

I wanted to watch cartoons.

I wanted to be a kid.

But somewhere along the way, I learned that my feelings didn't change what was expected of me.

And as I got older, I started shutting those feelings down.

I went from being someone who felt deeply for everybody to someone who sometimes struggled to feel anything at all.

Depression became part of my life at a young age.

And when you're struggling to care for yourself, sometimes you don't have the emotional energy to keep taking care of everybody else.

In a strange and unfortunate way, that became my way out of always being the responsible one.

But I wouldn't recommend it to anybody.

Because there's a difference between having boundaries and becoming so emotionally exhausted that you stop caring.

And now, at 44, I'm trying to find my way through all of it.

Some days I feel nothing.

Other days, everything feels overwhelming.

Sometimes I make progress. Sometimes I don't.

I'm learning that I don't have to go back to being the little girl who cried over everything, and I don't want to stay the woman who sometimes feels nothing.

I want to find somewhere in between.

Somewhere I can feel things without drowning in them.

Somewhere I can care about people without forgetting myself.

Somewhere I can say no because I choose to, not because I have nothing left to give.

I don't have all the answers.

I'm still working through things I didn't even realize I was carrying.

But maybe that's what this part of my life is about.

Not becoming somebody new.

Just learning how to be myself without having to shut pieces of myself away to survive.

Were you a sensitive child who learned to hide your emotions as you got older? And if so, how did you learn to let yourself feel again?