1:00PM
Why don’t I want to show how I feel? Why don’t I want people to know more about my body, what I’m thinking, what I’ve done, and other aspects of my life?
I think it comes down to a simple thing: do I believe someone is going to help me or going to hurt me?
I think about the times in my life that I’ve been hurt the most and they have often come from the people who know me the most. These people, typically friends and friendly, and more so, romantic partners, know which buttons to push, as we’d say. They know what makes me angry, what makes me sad, what makes me ashamed, what makes humiliated, and often hit those points hard and strong.
However, I believe that most of the time, they’re not trying to deliver that hurt. As I once read on Twitter: “hurt people hurt people.” Even so, I often don’t know if someone is going to use their new information to hurt me, so I hesitate to open up.
At the same time, if people don’t know me, then they also cannot help. They don’t know where I’m struggling, they don’t know what causes me pain, they don’t know what I dream to achieve. I remember speaking with a professor from the University of Michigan Ross Business School about compassion in business. She was talking about how to get more compassion in the workplace and the metaphor that came my mind for compassion was that of the body’s immune system. For the immune system to heal the body, it must first know where in the body there is damage. Similarly, for an organization to heal itself, it must first know where in the organization is damage. So, I imagine the damaged cells/tissue must send an alert of some sort to communicate the need for help in a specific location. Likewise, I believe in an organization, the one who needs help must show that they need help so the others can come to help.
I think we all have the ability to help or hurt, heal or damage. I like to think that I believe people are going to help me, that they have good intentions to help me, and yet I think that I often believe people will hurt me by accident or out of their own pain.
I think sometimes people trying to help us can hurt us. They give us advice, they lend a hand, or they do all these things for us that we don’t necessarily want them to do. They can sometimes hurt us by helping too much.
However, I suppose this is the challenge of opening up: if we don’t open up, people can’t help us, but they also can’t really hurt us. If we do open up, people can help us but they can also hurt us.
Opening up is powerful. And just as many things, it is powerfully good and powerfully bad, just depending on how we look at it.
Still scares the hell out of me.
1:10PM
