True self~

My dad once told me my biggest downfall is that my heart was too big. 

When he said that I thought he was insane. How could having a big heart be a bad thing? 

A few years have passed now and I'm starting to understand what he meant: I have a tendency to care for people more than they'd ever care for me. Family, friends, strangers. 

With that being said, I have also come to realize that in me caring so much for these people I have begun to care more so about what they think about me. A true people pleaser. I have a hard time saying "no" to anyone even if its not what I want at all, as long as it makes the people around me happy. 

I used to tell myself that being a light in the world and making sure others were happy and taken care of would in return deliver me some type of happiness. I was wrong. I was taking away from myself this whole time.

I found that I was becoming ashamed of who I am, what I liked and my feelings if others couldn't understand them or didn't feel like they were important or valid. Since I cared so much about making sure the people around me were at their best I began conditioning my self to hide who I really was as not to trouble them. I began to feel like my emotions and feeling were not as theirs.

If you have ever talked to me in real life, you may have realized that  I often add a disclaimer to down play my emotions that are usually very real.

"I don't know why I am feeling this way and it's probably really stupid but...."

Nothing is worse than feeling some way and someone telling you you're wrong for feeling that way. I could go on to tell you about how the people closest to me have hurt me in this way and didn't even know what they were doing to me but do I really want to call out my best friends? Parents? Or how even the guy I was supposed to marry made me feeling like what I cared about was a burden? Not really. Stories for another time. 
Until then I'm going to continue to undo what I have been doing for the past 23 years. It's time for me to really shine.