Childish ways

Do what you feel in your heart to be right for you'll be criticised anyway. You'll be damned if you do, damned if you don't."

Eleanor Roosevelt

I have been thinking that it is a really sad thing that somewhere along the way I stopped trusting people and came to respect people so little that I have come to a place of expecting people to hurt me and let me down.

As my dear friend Bel has pointed out on numerous occasions

"No-one can make you inferior without your consent"

Eleanor Roosevelt

I can remember being told as a young woman that my greatest failing is that I wear my heart on my sleeve. Some have said I am too passionate. Others have said I am too trusting.

And over the years in response to various situations that brought about these critical evaluations, I shut down. I allowed myself to believe the lie that these wonderful character traits were somehow wrong - that they were in fact failings - that they were childish. So as I "put off" my childish ways in search of a person who was so distant from who I was, I died a little. And then a little more. Until one day, I just stopped trusting and shut down completely.

The feelings of inferioity, worthlessness, incapability and despair brought about more and more medication until one day I was not only shut down emotionally but physically as well.

And as I cried our to God, He heard. He responded. The path has been slower than I would have liked and at sometimes is more precarious than I ever would have imagined but day by day I am learning and I am walking into greater freedom.

So I have asked myself, "Why am I afraid to be passionate?" "Why am I reserved?" "Why am I afraid to trust?"

And what is disappointment and hurt at someone else's hands? Sad? Yes. But something to be afraid of? No.

I hid this blog away from the world a few weeks ago and have even more recently considered restricting it even further. But at the end of the day, my trust is not in the reader, that you will read it, misinterpret it and somehow make me feel inferior for writing it, but my trust is in God, that even if you DO read it and misinterpret it, that I cannot be made to feel inferior because I KNOW who I am and God KNOWS who I am.

And that is enough.

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Simply Fi