novels4u.com

“I’m not ready yet,” you keep saying, “I’m not ready to show myself yet. When I show myself, I make myself vulnerable, attackable. Who knows what kind of opinions will arise about me. Who knows how I affect people. Who knows what kind of comments will be made, which may not always be friendly. Who knows how personal these will become. Some people have no sense of respect and boundaries at all.”

“But if you don’t show yourself, then you can’t be seen either,” I reply.
“If you don’t show yourself, you can never know how you appear to others, how much you can give and how much will be accepted You never experience the moment, that wonderful, deep moment in which acceptance, understanding happens.”
“But I don’t want to be hurt,” you interject, “I want to be seen, but still hold myself back. I have suffered so many wounds because I thought I could open myself up and show myself. I have experienced so many rejections and I don’t want to be hurt again. It just hurts way too much. And it doesn’t get any easier with time, on the contrary, it gets worse and worse. I’m afraid of it.”
“And you want to find a way to let yourself be seen without showing yourself,” I interject mockingly, “You want to find a way to give something of yourself and still remain closed, you want to avoid the pain by driving away the happiness, you want to avoid the hurt escape by letting yourself freeze, want to be loved without revealing anything about yourself.”
“That’s exactly it!” you say triumphantly, finally crawling out from under the blanket you were hiding under.
“I’m glad that I can finally look at you again when I talk to you and not just at this stupid blanket!” I say with a sigh of relief, “But still, it doesn’t work. You cannot accept without opening up. You can demand understanding if you don’t reveal anything about yourself, you can’t be seen if you don’t show yourself. Why don’t you just stop thinking about the pain that was caused to you because you showed yourself and instead think about all the moments when you experienced enrichment, when your openness was met with openness, when your Understanding-giving accompanied understanding in which your disclosure was lovingly wrapped?”
“It sounds so simple when you say it. Pretend nothing happened and see what happens. Isn’t that what you’re suggesting to me?”
“You don’t need to, but you can move out, in small steps, feel around, but it will always be a risk, just as it was a risk to show yourself to me. Just as it was a risk for me to show myself to you. But what if we hadn’t taken on this risk, what if we had remained within ourselves? What if we hadn’t given each other the chance to get closer to each other? What if we had decided not to show ourselves?” I reply thoughtfully.
“We wouldn’t have seen each other, couldn’t have seen each other,” and for the first time you realize how much you can gain by letting yourself be seen.

***