Stop trying to seal your heart.

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Remaining in emotional solitary confinement costs us.

There is a cost to making your heart neatly sealed, safe from the joys and sorrows of life.

I never heard my dad talk about his feelings. He never told me he loved me in words. He sucked it all in, where it bubbled like trapped, molten lava. How can I love him when he has never allowed himself to be open? To be vulnerable? To see behind what lies behind his beating heart?

How can we love someone when we don’t see that person without a shield?

Your heart follows you wherever you are.

A dear friend of mine packed her bags and moved to the other side of the world. A boyfriend had hurt her. He had stormed on her heart crushing it into pieces.

She was too afraid to pick up the pieces.

She decided to seal her heart – from any future hurts. She could not bear to live in the same city as the one who had cheated on her. Leaving her family by crossing the Atlantic Ocean seemed like a good idea to her at the time.

But.

Your heart follows you wherever you are.

When I talked to her after 3 months of leaving Ethiopia, her voice was still broken. Like an animal who is wounded and cowering at the farthest end of the wall, talking to her was heart wrenching.

She has created barriers and defense strategies for herself to survive. But she is still in pain. She is still carrying the residue of her hurt around with her affecting the way she lives.

There is nowhere to run.

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, and irredeemable.” – C.S. Lewis

You run from vulnerability because your trust has been broken.

Your refusal to let yourself be vulnerable has everything to do with trust. Someone has snatched the trust you gave them and buried it deep in the earth. You can’t find it because pile after pile of protective mechanism has accumulated on the trust you once had.

A close friend has betrayed you. Or a person you trusted the most has been cheating on you with a close friend. Like my ex-boyfriend did to me.

Your heart retreats onto itself. It protects itself by sealing its boundaries. It hides from you so far that you cannot even take a glimpse at it.

You become this person who is alive –but dead inside.

In ‘Daring Greatly’ book, author Brene Brown gives us a marble jar metaphor. You will not start trusting people again just like that. That is what I told my dear friend who has closed her heart from the outside world.

Think of an empty jar. It is empty because your trust level has become zero. Now, when someone does something that restores your trust in humanity, put one marble in the jar. Your family may have betrayed you but this other person has done what he said he would do.

That is how trust is built. One marble at a time.

Trust isn’t a grand gesture. It’s a growing marble collection.

That is how you start caring again. That is how you start releasing the barriers you have put surrounding your heart. That is how you come out of your shell.

Fear distracts us from what is important and that is love.

Do you know what being afraid to be with someone you would like to be with feels like? Like putting him in a room and yourself in another room. If you are living together, you go out of your rooms and have breakfast or lunch, or dinner. But you are not together.

Not really.

Not when you have not shared your true emotions and feelings. Not when you are not actively growing your relationship. Not when you are not walking together in the same direction. Not when you are sitting next to each other but that person doesn’t know you. Not while you are in this protective box you have put yourself. Not when you are holding that box with a tight fist refusing to let anyone in.

This is what fear does to us. It prevents us from giving ourselves to the one we love. It distracts us from what is important and that is love.

I learned to take action based on my love – rather than my fear bit by bit. At first, it felt like something was choking me to retreat back to my safe blanket, like let me go back and be alone, like let me just avoid being hurt ever again.

But love and fear cannot co-exist.

I learned to be vulnerable slowly. I let him see me. This felt like a feeling of weightlessness as if a balloon filled with something heavy that had been tethered to me was now drifting off into the stratosphere. Sharing my fear had been easier than I’d thought. Especially telling it to the one who loves me and wraps me up in his comforting arms.

Imagine this.

Put something you are afraid of in a room. It could be public speaking. Or loving someone again. Or picking up your broken heart again. Or it could be starting your business.

You put these things in a room – preferably downstairs – and you close the door.

Your demons are living and breathing there.

Closing the door and windows firmly so that not a single light passes through the room makes you think you are a clever one. Let your fears rot in hell.

Instead of shining a light on your demons, you flip the light off, expecting your demons to go away from your room by themselves.

They don’t.

“You will not see light unless your intact heart gets broken and light breaks in through the broken pieces.” – Dushka Zapata

Open your heart until you hear it crack.

I have a friend who is 7 years old. Abel has lost his parents since he was 2 years old. I met him at an orphanage before the pandemic. It would be easy to argue he doesn’t yet fully understand what love means and yet I believe that it is precisely because there is no scarring or mental concepts attached to his understanding of it that he expresses it so purely and freely.

I wonder sometimes how when his mother has been taken away from him by death that he can love so freely.

I have never once seen him angry at the world for taking his parents at his young age. I have never once seen him pout and hole himself up in his room shutting the world out. He is always smiling and making jokes with other children.

He laughs joyously as if he is living inside a castle. And he might as well have because his heart is so full of love that others seeing him eye him with jealousy.

His eyes sparkle with enjoyment.

His smile is more powerful than the blazing of the sun.

And I marvel at him.

He expresses love whenever he feels like it – whether that is 10 times a day or none at all. His eyes are not hiding anything behind their shadows. They assume an unbearable tenderness. A desire to see me happy wherever I visit him and the others – making me question all the times I block myself against myself, the moments when I find a self-directed dislike growing in me.

This boy of 7 loves fiercely.

His heart is open. You can hear its crack a million times by the hardship life has thrown at him before he is even ten. And yet he still loves deeply and fully.

There is no notion in him of regulating the outpour of his love to protect his heart or of using it to accomplish any other end but to see me happy and smiling like him all the time.

It’s almost as if he has to share his love, has to give it and show it with the same wonder that you would for seeing a beautiful sunset and you tell yourself, “My God, I have to share this with someone!”

It is outrageously beautiful to see and witness the way this boy loves.

Your relationship may end in disaster and pain but love to the depths of your heart. And only then will you be free, open-hearted, and present. And pulsingly alive.

Love desperately. And hear the sound of your heart shattering over you making you hurt. Love again.

Choose love over caution, over fear, and over pride.

And if it doesn’t work out like you have hoped it would, let go of your love. And it would be the greatest show of grit, of pain, and of love that you would show to yourself.

Fight to stay open, to feel those terrifying emotions, to remain vulnerable – even if that means getting hurt.

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