Bottled Up: Are You Like Me, Do You Hold A Lot In?

1960s Sad Crying Woman Trapped Inside Glass Bottle
IMAGE: © H. Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock/Corbis

You know what...
I'm just gonna be very real, very honest.

Are you anything like me?

Do you start each day (before applying your clothes, before applying your make-up, before applying that new perfume) applying your strong-face?

I usually try to apply it before I get out the bed. Sometimes its the only way that I even make it out of the bed each day.

My strong-face is me at my optimal self. That me that I portray to the world.

My strong-face is an outer mask and an inner stopper.

It outwardly projects to everyone around that I smiling and okay, that I'm strong and fearless, that I can quickly overcome obstacles in a single bound... Like SUPERWOMAN

It inwardly plugs a cork into my fermenting, bottled up emotions, allowing me to not feel them right now, allowing me funtion in accordance to societal standards accepting inhumane circumstances such as:

• 3 paid days of grievance after losing a parent
• women having to work up to their pregnancy due dates because they can't afford not to then to have to return a week after delivery just to keep their job
• having to accept minimum wages and deadend jobs
•  not understanding the reasons why
• never feeling fully in control of your life because there is another system in place established to control it.

So you will forever be in debted to someone...
Yea you went to school but you'll be paying for it for the rest of your life,
No matter how much you intend to, your FICO just will never be quite right
And you will never know what exactly goes on behind closed doors.

But I'm supposed to be okay with these circumstances, right?
I'm just supposed to go to work, smile and tap dance and perform
My feelings don't matter to anyone, I'm supposed to keep them to myself
I can only express them when its appropriate, however I've been trained to think that they are never appropriate
Because feeling is too human, when I must perform like a robot
Feeling slows production and doesn't make money
So I bottle up my feelings and put on my strong-face

But my heart knows that this is not right
so what am I to do? Where am I to go?
Where is that place that I can have raw, true, honest emotion and feelings that don't need to be justified, just the acknowledgement that they exist, that they are valid, they are natural, they are human, and they are mine

I have found that, that place is within myslef
I found that I have been so programmed to hide my feelings, that I also hide them from myslef, afraid that they would make me weak, but I found that they make me stronger, more human, more accepting to the fact that I am the creation of The Creator and that in my time here that is all that I need to be.

I can't bottle myself.
The more I express myself the more I am myself, and know myself, and the more others know me.
We are never alone in our feelings and our struggles though our strong-faces fool us into thinking so.

Believe me I'm not saying that the strong-face isn't necessary for societal living and working but it is definately detrimental to Self.
Tomorrow morning  when you wake up ready to apply your strong-face, stop and try just boldly being your true self.