Humanizing Myself

I have spent years trying to convince myself and everyone else that I was human enough.

Not in a science-fiction sense as if I’m a robot or an alien or another specie. I wasn’t questioning whether I had a soul. It is more like standing in a room full of people who all seemed to understand it. They cried at the right moments without overthinking it, laughed easily and wore their feelings like a second skin. There I was on the other side wondering why I felt like I was just watching it all behind a glass.

What makes a person human, exactly? I used to think about this like it was a riddle I could solve if I thought hard enough. I’d go so deep into my own head that I’d forget my name. I’d lose the thread of where I ended and my thoughts began. I still do this sometimes and it is not going away.

“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.” — Søren Kierkegaard

What I was experiencing is called emotional suppression. Research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that people who suppress their emotions don’t experience them less intensely. They just carry the weight of them alone and their bodies and minds pay the price. Higher stress levels. Difficulty connecting with others. A kind of loneliness that’s hard to explain because everything on the outside looks fine.

That was me. Everything was fine. My face said so.

The first time I realized I felt things more intensely than most people around me, my instinct wasn’t to lean into it but to hide it. To perform neutrality. To master the poker face. If I didn’t show it, no one could use it against me. No one could look at me like I was too much. I became very good at it.

What I didn’t realize was that I was becoming a stranger to myself.

For years I wore it like an armor, and I thought I was protecting myself. On the outside, happy and sad and furious all looked the same, a kind of calm, unbothered neutrality that people probably read as composed. On the inside, I was a weather system. Thunder with no sound. I was exploding constantly and no one around me had any idea, because my face was always neutral.

I wouldn’t say I woke up one day and decided to change. It didn’t happened in a heartbeat. It was gradual. I started learning. Slowly, then all at once. I tried to get to know more about myself. What it means to be someone who feels deeply in a world that often rewards people who perform with less emotion. I started paying attention to what was actually happening inside me.

And then, just last year, something shifted. I cried. It was the kind where you don’t care what your face is doing. I laughed so hard at something stupid that my stomach hurt. I told someone I was angry, and I meant it, and I didn’t immediately soften it into something easier for them to hear just to make them feel comfortable. I felt things and I let my face show it.

I made myself feel safe. That’s the thing no one tells you. Sometimes the person who has to give you permission to feel is you. I would have loved for someone to have done that for me when I was younger. I would have loved for someone to sit across from me and say: all of it is okay. The big feelings, the loud feelings, the ones that don’t make sense. You are not too much or broken. You just feel things, and that is one of the most human things there is.

But no one did, and so I’m telling it to myself now. It may be late but not too late.

There is something quietly revolutionary about letting yourself feel. It doesn’t make you weak. It makes you present. It makes you real and free.