Vulnerability
Like most people I know, I didn't grow up in a home where it was okay to express your feelings. I was consistently invalidated, gaslit, all the things. My feelings felt like a burden to my parents and eventually to myself. I didn't want to deal with them, I didn't understand them. I didn't know how to deal with them. I went a lot of my life feeling like I didn't have feelings. But somehow in the same breath I always knew I felt them. I felt other people's feelings. I absorbed them even. Trauma is funny in that way, I became so hypersensitive and aware of other people's feelings yet somehow couldn't give mine the same awareness. People saw me as emotionally withdrawn. I didn't show myself being vulnerable a lot, hell I still don't. But something I've been consistently told is "Leo, I never know how you feel". That confused me because, I talk so much. I think I can talk for a whole room if I could, and I thought I was talking ab...