The Middle

I’ve been feeling stuck. Uninspired. Doubtful. I’ve been feeling a lot, really.

Doubt and fear kept me from blogging, originally. Writing was a relaxing outlet, but I doubted heavily that anyone would care to hear my thoughts. “How am I different from the incessant rants on social media I gripe about? Will people think differently of me when I share my truths? Will they still like me? Will they dislike me?” The bullet was somehow bit, and here we are.

Pressure came on the scene as I shared. I wanted quality over quantity, but to be valued, I thought I’d have to be consistent in posting—and it was more than what free time allotted. “Do I have anything more to say? Do they only want to know my deep personal stories? Do I share all of them? Oh God, no, no, definitely not those. My mom reads this. My friends’ moms read this. It would be fun to write elsewhere. I have TONS I’d love to write anonymously.”

I thought I had kicked doubt and fear to the curb, but look at them showing up again, trying to ruin my party.

Adding insult to this feeling party, I had received some comments criticizing my stories. Now, for those unfamiliar with online fame, this is standard and to be expected. My fame is relatively new, though, so I’m not yet immune to cyber bullying. It hurt. It hurt that they insulted me and my mother. Which is, in fact, what had happened after my Mother’s Day blog. Don’t you know, they must have typed in their email wrong, and I couldn’t gracefully reply.

You see, I am a super feeler. I can become overwhelmed with emotion. Easily excitable, if you will. The type that tears up over a story about your neighbor’s boyfriend’s sister-in-law’s coworker’s whatever. Whether it’s my emotion or yours, I go all in.

Unfortunately, there are downsides to super feeling. The swallowing of pain that feels like it could suck your heart out. A torturous feeling of doubts, fears, and lows at depths others don’t seem to reach, or can and have, but are pre-packaged with armor to make it more fleeting.

I remember a conversation with friends where one of us was sharing a particularly challenging time. She mentioned she had gone home the night before and cried on her bathroom floor. She quickly became embarrassed, feeling she had shared too much. As a sign of solidarity and to shield her from feeling worse, I blurted out, “You have not liiiived until you’ve cried on the bathroom floor!”

She let out a laugh, but I was only speaking a truth. If you’ve found yourself on the bathroom floor with more tears and snot than Charmin’ has plys for—well then, you must have been up to something big. You risked and the payout didn’t come through.

Wishing I could turn back time (go ahead, sing it out) before I committed to this blog and wrestling with the feelings of doubt and fear and a touch of pain made me want to hide. I was certainly not going to write from this space.

Happy endings often come with messy middles, though. As you can imagine, the middles for super feelers can get pretty messy. The unfortunate feelings of doubt, fear, insecurity, and anger are within us all. They show up in all areas of our lives. Every so often, when they come to the scene, I can’t let them pass. I have to roll deep in the mud with the pain until the lesson is clear. It’s not always pretty.

I’ve spoken about how expressing gratitude is the key to happiness, to being committed to always moving forward, the power of now, intentional living, blah, blah, blah…and it is all true. The tips and tricks serve me well, but they were born from a lot of committed work following pigsty messy middles and some bathroom floor cries.

The part of any story where what lays ahead remains to be seen is as valuable as the rest. I have not plotted out my next ten posts, and turning back was never an option. I’m in a middle. But the middle is pivotal.

*Previously published on thisnakedlife.com.