“I understand now that I’m not a mess but a deeply feeling person in a messy world. I explain that now, when someone asks me why I cry so often, “For the same reason I laugh so often – because I’m paying attention.” – Glennon Doyle Melton

 

People build walls for reasons. Their guard and structures were created to keep them safe in some way. They (or you) cannot start to break down walls until you know why they were there in the first place. And when the walls do come down, those walls actually need to be thanked for trying to protect our hearts in a specific way – though no longer needed.

So what happens when you fall in love with someone whose walls are all up? And you just try and break them down because to your core you know love is all there is? Well, sometimes you win, but in my case, you don’t. Sometimes you fall in love and the person’s walls cannot let them out to the beauty of healing and depth. And that is a grief that fills the world far too fully.

And the way I’m wired – my own flaws and insecurities and past, automatically makes me feel like somehow, the fact that love couldn’t conquer was my fault. If I had loved better, been better, sacrificed better…. Maybe it could have worked. And I rip my soul of out of my body in that pain over someone else’s walls keeping me out.

But I’ve realized something lately. Through (and in) profound grief and soul searching and (amazing friends who talk me through all of this for hours up hours), that when you live at a higher frequency of intimacy and vulnerability, it threatens everything in some people. The ones who have spent their whole life resisting intimacy, resisting vulnerability and they have built those walls to protect themselves from depth and feeling because it was far too dangerous. And then they get around you, or near you, or fall in love with you (or pieces of you) and realize your frequency and your nature is everything they've spent their lives building up walls against, they have two options. 

1. face it and get help and start breaking down the walls no matter how painful it is

or

2. run like hell.

And most people in my life and history have not had the ‘ah-ha!’ moment of change and vulnerability. They have run like hell from me (and from their own hearts), leaving me devastated and empty and feeling like there was something wrong with me and that I should make myself less and smaller and less intense and less vulnerable and less transparent (basically if I just cut my entire soul in half, that would be easier for them to swallow). When really it was just the frequencies we lived at couldn't match each other. I lived a level they weren't comfortable with, it exposed their pain and fears and contentment to settle and stay safe with their own hearts, and they lived at a level that felt like trying to make a fish breathe on land. It killed me. It sucked the oxygen and soul right out of my body.

It hurts like hell though, doesn’t it? But this blog is for you today. If you're like me, and you live your life at a higher emotional frequency, a higher level of intimacy and vulnerability, there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re the brave one in this story – not the foolish one (though I know you constantly feel like one.) YES, we need to cover our blind spots and heal and change and grow and temper ourselves and not be reckless and emotionally unstable (I know. I’m working on it in myself. Sometimes when all you do is feel, it can get unbalanced and unhealthy too). But with that in mind, if you are like me and live with your heart on your sleeve, your emotions bubbling over, your love profoundly deep and complex and your heart pure with love and tenderness, there is nothing wrong with you. You are NOT too much. You just live at a frequency that the world has learned to channel down or turn off completely. You are aware to the depth of beauty and pain around us and you are tuned into a channel that most aren't. Don’t keep trying to die to parts of yourself, cut off pieces of who you are, force yourself to fit into other people’s boxes. You just live at a different frequency. And that is okay! Yes, we may always feel like outcasts and misunderstood and the crowd of 'too much', ' too emotional', 'too full of heart.' But we will find each other in that place. We will find our tribe of other ‘too muches’, and they will make us realize it's better to be too much than feel nothing at all. And we will learn to love the ones whose frequency is lower, and not take it personally when we cannot fix them all or get through to them all. But do not, I beg you, do not try and be less. We were created to live the higher frequency of love and tenderness.

Here’s a little story I love about canaries that has spoken so much to my soul lately.

 

Coal miners in Pennsylvania did dangerous, deadly work in the mines. There were deadly, invisible toxins in the mines, but the miners bodies weren't sensitive enough to register the poison. So they carried a canary in a cage down into the mines with them sometimes. The canary's body was built to be sensitive to toxins, so the canary became their lifeguard. When the toxin levels rose too high, the canary stopped singing, and this silence was the miners signal to flee the mine. If the miners didn't leave fast enough, the canary would die and, not much later, so would the miners.
 

We’re not ‘too much’, we’re just canaries. We’re the ones signaling the danger of turning your hearts off, we’re the ones crying out that love is in the depth and vulnerability and ‘scary’ parts of our souls, and it is costly, but worth it to go into those dark places of ourselves and love from there. We’re not crazy, or too much, or any of the labels we (I know I have), put on ourselves over and over and over. We’re just the ones crying out over the real danger in the air around us.

That’s the higher frequency. We are the ones, when we stop singing, is when everyone should worry. Don’t try and kill yourself off because the poison fills your lungs just a little too much. Hold on. Hold tight. And learn to love yourself – learn to love your levels of frequency that are misunderstood my many. Because it is beautiful, and rare, and tender, and needed. Be the little canary that you were created to be. 

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