Because Sometimes I Just Need To Vent

I took a deep breath. I bit my tongue. I went outside for some fresh air and perspective.

But when I came back inside and felt no better, I wondered how I could have let things get to this point. I wondered why I have spent the last few weeks denying my frustration, internalizing it, attributing it to one of my own many faults. I wondered why I have allowed this act to become such a habit. I wondered why I deny myself my emotions.

Not the happy ones, not joy or gratitude or awe. I know how to feel those. I know how to feel them more deeply and profoundly than most I have come across. I know what it means to be so filled with light and love that you feel as though at any moment you may burst with exuberant bliss. I know how to give myself permission to be happy.

It's annoyance, frustration, anger, sadness that are the problem. It's asking for help. It's admitting to myself that it's possible for bad things to happen that aren't my fault. It's reminding myself that I am human and that entitles me to feel the bad along with the good, the pain along with the joy, the imperfections along with the moments of divine transcendence. My humanness entitles me to my mistakes. It entitles me to tears and screams and pain. It entitles me to everything that life has to offer.

Why is that so hard to remember? Why is it that the moment I begin to feel frustrated or angry, I reflect it back upon myself? Why am I so quick to assume that it's something wrong with me?

I repeat this pattern over and over again. Then weeks have passed -- months, years. Then it seems too late to say anything. When I bottle it up, it grows, it evolves, it becomes this ocean of rage in which I drown. If I choose instead to share my frustrations, I then carry the heaviness of guilt that only gossiping can bring. Often the admitting of such ill feelings only makes me feel worse, feel more stuck, feel weak and helpless and unwilling to take the next step. Sometimes I don't know how I'll ever escape this cycle of guilt.

I am so tired of feeling guilty. I am tired of regrets. I am tired of allowing myself to feel like the bad guy in every scene, of stepping aside from people who are more self-assured, of being suffocated beneath my own self-doubt. I am so tired of being angry. I am so tired of wanting to be someone else, of wishing my life looked differently than it does, of trying to escape myself. I am so tired of denying myself things that I want and need and deserve. I am so tired of feeling undeserving. I am so tired of running away. I am so tired of hiding. I am so tired of carrying all the should haves, would haves, could haves. I am so tired of feeling the weight of things that went unspoken. I am so tired of feeling the constant nagging of the alternate version of me that I was supposed to be. I am so tired of feeling like a walking failed expectation.

I think of those moments bursting with joy. I reflect on those days so filled with light. I take a deep breath and fill my heart with their hopeful promises of brighter days, days when my soul doesn't feel quite so tired, days when I am awake, and alive, and lacking a single thing to vent about.