You are NOT a burden

"I just don't want to be a burden."

How often have you told yourself that and hidden your feelings, fears, and pain from loved ones?

Earlier this week, I was talking with a friend who's been through a lot the past couple years. As we discussed coping with life's challenges by relying on loved ones, she said, "I just don't want to be a burden."

Relying on loved ones can be scary.

For so many of us, something in our past frightened us into thinking that sharing our pain with others puts an unconscionable weight on their shoulders. We fear becoming an inconvenience. We fear they'll get tired of us and reject us.

And that's true. They would reject us... if we really were the people we perceive ourselves to be.

But we're not. Mirrors are ugly. We see too many blemishes and scars to love ourselves and the beauty of the person we really are; the one we've hidden from the world.

We all have our ups and downs. Sometimes the crushing weight of the world drives us into despair and sometimes we find ourselves soaring above it.

When we love someone, we don't just experience their sorrow. We also experience their joy. And we experience their peace and their chaos and their awe and their anger and so much more. That's what makes us all human and we fall in love with humans, not robots.

Not only did I see this in the mentioned conversation, but over the past two weeks, I saw it in two other conversations with different friends. I see it in myself, over and over again.

For as long as I can remember, I buried my negative emotions where no one could see them. I suppressed my feelings in fear of burdening loved ones. I was scared that if they knew me, they wouldn't like me; that I'd be nothing but a weight on their shoulders.

I felt I wasn't worthy of being loved. So I hid behind perpetual "happiness".

The great irony is that what brought me authentic happiness was being there for the people I love in both joyous moments and painful ones. It's a gift to share in another's woes as much as it's a gift to share their abundance.

I'm not a burden to those I love any more than they're a burden to me.

You are NOT a burden.

To my family and my friends, I love you and you're the joy of my life. Let me be there for you just as you want to be there for me. Consider it a gift to me. It's what I yearn for more than anything in this world.

Let your sorrow carve a valley into my soul,
That I may fill it with the joy of love.

❤

Fuck it, hit publish now

One of the privileges my work and community involvement offer me is interaction with a large number of interesting people. About once a month, someone I meet will tell me they read something from this blog and that it had a meaningful impact on them.

In fact, this happened about 2 hours ago at a hackathon we're hosting at my workplace. One of the participants introduced himself and said he appreciated my post about how I royally screwed up in school. He shared how he went through a similar challenge, failing several classes and thinking he should just drop out, before finding his passion and turning things around. Like me, he ended up at one of the world's top software companies.

That conversation meant a lot to me.

Despite these kinds of experiences, I haven't posted in over 9 months. Still, I jot down notes all the time and have over 25 pending posts that are half-written. So, why haven't I posted?

The reasons mentioned in my first blog post, titled "Why Blog?" and published Nov 2011, are still relevant. Shared experiences are valuable. In fact, I've learned that there's even more value in creating content than I originally saw. Sharing experiences publicly has given me amazing opportunities to connect with and learn from others.

I think my biggest issue has been with agonizing over perfection. I spend hours writing, re-writing, regretting, revising every post. In that original post I said, "anyone can take 15 minutes while waiting for the bus to jot down a few thoughts." What I didn't realize at the time was that I'd never feel satisfied enough to publish after 15 minutes. Or 30 minutes. Or 120 mintues.

I crave more experiences like the one I described at the beginning of this post. Opportunities to form deep connections with others means the world to me.

I'm going to give two things a shot for a while. First, I'm going to relax my standards to a point where I'm less comfortable publishing, but still willing to hit the publish button. Second, I'm going to write on a regular basis, starting with 15 minutes a day, 5 days a week. Over time, I'm hope to see a rise in quality and a fall in time spent per published post post.

Well, it's been about 1.5 hours since I started working on this. Fuck it. I'm hitting publish now...

[Edit: 2 minutes after hitting publish, I saw that I'd forgotten to give the post a title. *sigh* Well... that gives me a good idea for a title.]