Rebuilding Walls

Vulnerability is a weird thing.  We all hate to be placed in such a state because it leaves us open to ridicule and hurt.  I tend to want to keep everything bottled up inside because that way, no one truly knows what or how I’m feeling, and I can’t be ripped or picked apart for it.  There’s a certain measure of safety and comfort that comes with not saying anything.  If you don’t know how I feel, you can’t make fun of me for it if you think that I’m thinking or feeling something you think is stupid.  I think that’s where I may have stumbled and initiated my slow, but gradual downfall.  I have no one to blame but myself, because I should have known better.  I knew better than to reveal myself, open myself up the way I did, and let all the walls down.  Yet, in the end, I still did it anyway.  Again, I blame myself because I knew better.  I really did.

I guess I thought that maybe things would have been different.  Maybe opening up would not have come back to haunt me, make me feel like I opened myself up just to be picked apart for it later?  I’m not that complex.  I thought that maybe I’d be understood, that I would not have to defend myself and the way that apparently I let things get to me.  I can’t be me because I’m the type to blow things out of proportion.  My feelings are too intense for the situation.  I overanalyze things.  I think too much.  I have to relax and not get upset about things, especially those things that are considered small, insignificant, and probably not worth the attention that I might give them.  In the end, I am the problem.  I’m nowhere near being the solution.  With as emotional as I can be, I can never be the solution.  I create more problems than I solve.

Is it so wrong that I want things to be a certain way?  I try to treat people the way that I’d want to be treated.  What galls me is when people don’t return that favor, again, like somehow, I’m the one who is out-of-line and just so unreasonable.  I don’t think that I ask for too much.  I genuinely don’t.  I think that’s where my problem lies.  I like to think that common courtesy should go both ways.  I’m courteous to you.  Why can’t I be the recipient of that same courtesy?  Why is that just so horrible of an expectation to have of others?

I’ve been accused of referring to myself as a victim, whenever I mentioned that I feel like I’ve been wronged in some way.  Victim is not the right term, I think.  I’m just of the mindset that there is some inequity here and I’d like to correct it.  I guess at the very least, I’d like to point it out and make it known that I feel like something wrong happened here and that things aren’t right.  That doesn’t make me a victim.  People can mistreat me all they like.  In the end, I can’t control how others want to treat and even relate to me, if at all.  The most I can do is say how I feel and hope that my words will be received well.

I’ve been accused of making mountains out of proverbial mole hills.  Maybe I do?  Maybe I’ll make a big deal out of something that is really so insignificant and miniscule that no one else in the world would give it a second thought?  Maybe I’m just trying to protect myself from being subject to something bigger by intervening when something small happens?  I’m trying to prevent the snowball effect from ever happening.

Being vulnerable sucks.  Opening up sucks.  Being expressive sucks.

It’s all made me wonder if I need to stop being expressive, stop opening up, and ultimately stop continuously putting myself in vulnerable positions.

I don’t know what more I can do, other than to just shut down and return to a state where I just keep everything inside again.  Being expressive and vulnerable has done little for me and has caused me more problems than I would have ever anticipated.

Maybe, just maybe, I need to shut up and revert to a state where I blend in with the scenery and never make my presence felt?

Maybe it’s time for this awakening to end?  I just don’t know how much further I can go with being wrong all the time, even with my feelings and how I perceive things.

Being expressive…what a fucking joke…