Part of Setting Your Standards is Being Honest About How You Feel

How many of you have hidden how something or someone has made you feel? 

How often have you hidden how you felt? 

After you hid your feelings, how did it make you feel?

Part of raising your standards and setting them high, is being completely unabashedly honest about how something made you feel. When you are honest about how something made you feel, you're saying "I will or will not tolerate this in my life because I like or don't like how it made me feel". You're also being honest with yourself. Otherwise, you'll just suppress and blow up later, or encourage depression and anxiety to set up shop in your mind. When someone blows you off, stands you up, says something that hurt, or they do something to make you feel badly, do you say how you feel? Or do you pretend you don't care? 

Why is society so obsessed with pretending they don't care? I for one, can't pretend for the life of me. Personally, I think it has to do with the over-masculinity of this world, not that this post is about radical feminism. Why is it not okay to be sad, angry, hurt, disappointed, frustrated, overly happy, ecstatic, elated, etc. When we are too happy, we are called crazy or told to calm down and it's nothing to be elated about. When we feel down, we are told to "cheer up", "smile", "Things will get better". Why is it not okay to feel anger or hurt? Feeling up or down about something is not handing over control to outside forces. Being honest about how you feel is being honest about who you are. Not everyone is going to understand that, no matter how close they are to you.That's okay. That's when more honesty comes in. If someone in your life doesn't understand why you feel a certain way but you are super close to them, openly explain it to them. Make them understand through open conversation. If every person understood what you felt and why you felt that way, there would be nothing to say to each other and nothing to talk about. 
   When you think about every conversation we have in our lives, the very root of them begins with how we feel about someone or something. Scientific findings exist because someone somewhere was passionate about the why, and connecting the dots, so they dedicated their lives to figuring things out that you and I couldn't. Everything starts with a feeling, an emotion, a spark that ignites a fire inside of you. Why would you want to hide that? When someone or something causes you to feel any strong emotion, it's because there's a passion inside of you. Disappointed? Hurt? It's because you have a soul and when you're hurt, you feel your soul. When you're happy, sad, it's your soul saying hello. Sometimes it hurts, sometimes it makes you so happy, you can feel your feet lift off the ground. When you open your soul to others and let them know it's there, the right people will fall in love with your soul and take part in protecting it so you don't have to. Every emotion and feeling you experience is important to your foundation. Don't hide them. Set them free and be completely honest with the world (and by that, I don't mean social media) about who you are and what ignites the fire inside of you. 

I hope you found solace in this, and found a way to set free your soul to the people you love. 

xoox
Annie-M