Hyssop

This blue-purple bloom represents cleanliness and sacrifice

[hyssopme]

This Is What It’s Like To Be An Overthinker And Deep Feeler

Why do you overthink so much? Why can’t you just let things happen? Why do you make everything more complicated than it needs to be? These are three questions I’ve been asked over and over again my entire life. And every single time, my answer is the same: I don’t know.

Overthinking can feel like a curse that creates problems that don’t exist and unnecessary heartache. The constant worrying and wondering about the what-ifs. Overanalyzing every little thing until you feel physically sick. So why do we do it? While I can’t speak for everyone, I think for the most part it’s just the way our brain is wired, but other times it’s not. Being a deep-feeler can feel like a burden in today’s society, where it’s easier to act like you don’t care about anything than it is to be vulnerable. So for those who are wondering what it’s really like to be an overthinker and deep feeler, here are some ways I can explain it.

Firstly, overthinking often coexists with anxiety. This means that our brains will automatically think of all the worst cases scenarios that could possibly happen, no matter how ridiculous they sound. We do this as a defense mechanism so we can mentally prepare ourselves in the event that something bad happens to us. It’s our mind’s way of protecting our heart. And since we feel everything so deeply, we have to make sure we can prepare for the worst so that maybe, just maybe, it will hurt a little less.

It’s often said that it’s both a blessing and a curse to feel everything so deeply, and this couldn’t be more true. When you feel things in extremes, you cannot balance your emotions. There is no gray area. You’re either on cloud nine or rock bottom, living life to the fullest or crying on the bathroom floor. There is no in-between. It can be mentally and emotionally exhausting to have a mind that is constantly living in what feels like a state of chaos.

We often get called overdramatic. Because even though deep down we know something isn’t the end of the world, that’s how it feels in our minds. And how it feels is all that matters in that moment. We’re basically in our feelings so much that they consume us. And it can be hard to decipher what’s real and what’s just our thoughts running wild.

People will tell us to stop overthinking, but unfortunately, it’s not that easy. We can’t turn it off like a switch. It’s not as simple as that. We wish we didn’t overanalyze everything, but we do it anyways. We do it to protect our heart and mind at the expense of debilitating anxiety.

We don’t want to burden people with our feelings. There are so many thoughts that run through our mind every day that it’s hard to make sense of them all. Our mood can change in seconds by just a single thought.

We are the most loving and caring people you will ever meet. Being an overthinker and a deep feeler means that we also have a tendency to overlove because we care so deeply for everyone and everything around us. We want the people we love to feel seen, heard, and understood. We will never let them go a day knowing we don’t care for them. So although being a deep feeler can be hard during the low moments, it can also be amazing during the good ones.

[hyssopme]

Sometimes you have to get comfortable with being alone. You have to learn how to be okay with wanting things people won’t understand and having dreams no one believes in. Sometimes you’re going to be the only person in the room who sees a different direction, who aspires to live a different life and you’ll have to fight as hell for it even if you secretly don’t know how you’ll make it or how you’ll get there.

Because at the end of the day, no one knows who you really are when all your masks fall off, no one sees what you see, no one feels what you feel and no one knows what truly keeps you up at night. You have to be your own person, you have to hold your own hand because you won’t always be lucky enough to find someone who understands your journey or stands by you until you make it.

You won’t always find people willing to climb a certain mountain with you.

Sometimes you have to climb alone — it’s exhausting and tiring and draining but once you get to the top, everything will look so small. Everything will make sense. You’ll be glad you made it, even if you’re the only one enjoying the view.

[hyssopme]

This… this is my soul song, people. This is my Vietnam.

1. You’re not anti-social, you’re selectively social.

2. At any given point, you have one (maybe two) best friends who are your entire life. You’re not a “group of friends” person. You can’t keep up with all that.

[hyssopme]

Cautious. Tentative. Shy. Secretive.

The first thing you have to know about a guarded girl, is that at least initially, you will likely not know that she’s a guarded girl.

You’ll come up with any myriad of synonyms to describe her, but none of them will be “guarded.” They might be words that praise her self-sufficiency or perhaps touch on how you find her difficult to read. But none of them will have anything to do with the fact that the distance she puts between herself and everyone else, has to do with self-preservation. With protecting her heart.

At first, she’ll just seem hard to get to know. More little shrugs and starts of stories rather than all out tales with no detail spared. You’ll think that maybe she’s simply more careful and methodical with her thoughts and actions than a girl who’s less reserved, who’s more impulsive. And to a certain extent she is.

She is difficult to get to know, to learn about. She is calculated with her words and thoughtful with her actions. She is cautious, she is tentative, perhaps shy and even secretive.

But she can be all of those, and still be a girl who’s guarded.

Because all of those things, all of those traits, they are an effect of being guarded.

They are an effect, an aftermath, of being hurt.

And when a girl is hurt, and hurt enough, she becomes a girl who’s guarded.

Because a girl who’s guarded is a girl who doesn’t trust love. And doesn’t trust your love. And doesn’t trust loving you.

And most importantly, she doesn’t trust herself.

A girl who is guarded is a girl who has loved and loved deeply. She’s put her heart, her soul on the line in the past only to come back empty handed. She’s risked everything for something, for someone and come back not only empty handed, but scarred. She’s gone all in and instead of coming back with someone’s everything, she’s lost her own and theirs all at once.

See, a girl who’s guarded isn’t incapable of loving.

She’s just making sure she doesn’t love the wrong someone ever again.

Instead of handing over her heart again with no questions asked and with a side of blind hope, she’s making sure that when she passes it to someone they know how special it is. Instead of leaping without being sure that someone is going to catch her, she makes sure that if she starts to fall she can catch herself. Instead of trusting someone simply based on their words, she’s making sure she fully understands what they mean when they speak, what they do when they promise, before making up her own mind whether or not to believe them.

Instead of putting her faith in others, she’s putting it in herself.

The truth about being guarded, and being a girl who’s guarded, is that there’s an element to being that which can never fully go away. You may love again, you will trust again, but there will still always be a little voice in the back of her head telling her, “Remember that time when…”

So when you love a girl who is guarded, you have to be louder than that voice.

When she thinks she shouldn’t be herself, you have to encourage her to be open. When she feels like she can’t trust her decisions, you have to put her mind at ease. When she’s convinced that she’s utterly unlovable, you have to love her anyway.

And when she feels like she’s starting to fall, you have to be there to catch her.

When you love a girl who’s guarded, in the beginning she’ll simply seem difficult to read.

Cautious. Tentative. Shy. Secretive.

But once you open her up, once you earn her trust, inside you’ll find one of the most beautiful stories you’ve ever had the privilege to read.

[hyssopme]

Sometimes We Just Have To Ignore Things So We Can Live Peacefully

We have to ignore our insecurities.  We have to ignore the apocalyptic voices in our head that take us to hell instead of heaven. We have to ignore the way they frighten us and the way they belittle us to believe that we’re not good enough. We have to try to shove them aside when they attack us and we have to trust ourselves more even if we’re unsure of ourselves. We have to ignore our uncertainty and just keep moving. 

We have to ignore those who left us behind. We have to ignore their promises, the plans we made for the future, the secrets they shared with us and the way they looked at us. We have to ignore these enchanting moments because they’re no longer happening. They chose to take it all back and we have no other choice but to leave them behind too, because fighting for them might not bring them back and even if it did, they will run away again. We have to ignore those who didn’t appreciate us and we have to ignore the way they made us feel about ourselves.

We have to ignore some of our questions. We have to ignore the dreadful questions we ask ourselves every night: ‘Why me? When will I be happy? What do I want? Why am I still here?’

Sometimes we have to ignore these tantalizing questions and trust that in time we will find the answers and that the answers may not always be what we wanted.

It’s hard to ignore the things that bother us but it’s also harder to live with all these burdens, they weigh us down if we pay too much attention to them.

We’re always faced with two choices; either we carry those burdens with us until they kill us or ignore them so we can live.

[hyssopme]

We don’t say goodbye anymore.

We just stop responding to their messages or answering their calls.

We pretend like we don’t really know them when we see them, we act like strangers, we act like we didn’t hurt them and we underestimate their pain. We’re too self-absorbed to consider their feelings so we don’t even say a kind word, we don’t even give a warm hug and we don’t even ask to make sure they’re okay.

We become distant, almost invisible, so they don’t even try to reach us, so they don’t try to ask for closure or ask for anything. We see them and walk the other way so we don’t even meet their eyes and see the way they look at us, we don’t want to remember that we’re the reason behind their sadness.

We make this decision selfishly because that’s all we know. We say goodbye because we found something better, something more exciting, something that we want more so we just drop people like tennis balls, replacing them easily as long as we keep playing.

We don’t say goodbye anymore, we say leave me alone. I don’t want you. You’re not worth my time

.

.

.

(It must be how you are thinking right now, right?)

[hyssopme]

Healing is Our Responsibility

Healing is our responsibility because unprocessed pain gets transferred to everyone around us, and we are not going to allow what someone else did to us to become what we do to those we love.

Healing is our responsibility because if we want our lives to be different, sitting and waiting for someone else to make them so will not actually change them. It will only make us dependent and bitter.

The thing is that when someone else does something wrong and it affects us, we often sit around waiting for them to take the pain away, as though they could come along and undo what has been done.

We are not meant to get through life unscathed.

We are not meant to get to the finish line unscarred, clean and bored.

Life hurts us all in different ways, but it is how we respond -- and who we become -- that determines whether a trauma becomes a tragedy, or the beginning of the story of how the victim became the hero.

From: “Trauma Is Not Your Fault, But Healing Is Your Responsibility” by Brianna Wiest on Thought Catalog

[hyssopme]

If I’m Being Honest, No One Has Ever Made Me Feel The Way You Did

myself

[hyssopme]

I wanna make peace with the fact that it wasn't meant to be. I really really do. I swear it. But it still hurts. The thing is, I know I deserve better. I deserve to be loved in the same way that I'm willing to love. I deserve to be loved by someone who laughs when I spill my Milo drink on myself. I deserve to be loved by someone who will bring me junk food when I want to stress eat. I deserve to be loved by someone who wants to hear about my day. I deserve to be loved by someone without having to beg for it.

But even in knowing all of that, I still have this tiny bit of hope that things will eventually fall back into place for us. I could just see something with that person. Something about us just felt right. But I just have to keep reminding myself that that person doesn't feel the same way. Because event if that person did at some point, believing that that person didn't is the only thing that's helping me move on.

[recaption]

[hyssopme]

#hitmehome

[hyssopme]

I’m interested in people and their stories, so it always worked well initially, but inevitably I would end up feeling like I was just a set of ears and the extravert actually had zero interest in me as a person.

[hyssopme]

Until now.

[hyssopme]

This isn’t some slip up, or it is caused by something that’s out of my control. This time, I choose to do this. 

Leaving.

And I’m not sure if it makes it better or worse.. that I have the option to stay, and yet I have chosen to leave.

One thing I am sure of, though, is the fact that I have to leave.