the heart as it is | courage • grief • beauty

Today’s prompt from Onsite is: “Is there something that keeps you from establishing intimacy in your closest relationships? Shame? Guilt? Take a moment to examine what hindrances you carry into your relationships.”

A short answer to this prompt is that vulnerability feels so scary and exposing in certain aspects of my closest relationships. There’s probably a level of shame that contributes to this, but it definitely manifests more as being scared of how people may respond, or being scared of the feeling inside my own body, like how that sensation feels, because I was never really taught to hold space for more “difficult” emotions in my body. In other aspects of my closest relationships, there is definitely guilt as well. With regards to friendships, for the most part I feel like I have been able to establish intimacy with a mix of boundaries I’ve set in place. Sometimes being vulnerable in friendships feels even scarier because they’re not as commitment-bound to you as a partner, for example. But I’ve learned that if friends won’t take the time to truly listen and take perspective of another person, at this point in my life perhaps we are not the right friends for each other (thankfully my closer friends at this point in time are not like that).