Inhibited

Self-censor, hold back, restrain, curtail desire. What is the distinction between being inhibited and being polite? Or being inhibited and being reckless? Can one be uninhibited and not hurt others' feelings? Inquiring minds want to know. If one is inhibited is one suppressed?

I know for sure a curse of being inhibited is thinking too much. Something I've been mulling over: comparisons. I need to stop making comparisons between myself or my children and others. It's not helpful, and it's either arrogant or crazy-making. Obviously this is my journal/blog/processing center, and what I say reflects what I experience. I want to remain grateful and self-aware, but beyond that comparison is not incredibly helpful. I feel what I feel, and my feelings are real, as Olaf says. It doesn't mean someone else is less sensitive (remember the stove metaphor?) or less unique or having an easier time. And also, it doesn't mean that what I'm feeling is any less real or intense. So I'm going to try to keep my ruminating solution-oriented.

At the recommendation of a friend, I've started reading Cheryl Strayed's Tiny Beautiful Things. Cheryl writes the following to a reader who bemoans the fact that she hasn't written the great American novel by age 26:

The most fascinating thing to me about your letter is that buried beneath all the anxiety and sorrow and fear and self-loathing, there's arrogance at it's core. It presumes you should be successful at twenty-six, when really it takes most writers so much longer to get there....You loathe yourself, and yet you're consumed by the grandiose ideas you have about your own importance. You're up too high and down too low. Neither is the place where we get any work done. We get the work done on the ground level.

Ooof. That hit home. I need to let go of my preconceived notions, my assumptions, my measuring tape and hunker down.