Don't Eat the Daisies

My silence is suffocating but expressing myself is a fate with the potential for consequences much worse than that. What choice do I have but to live with the deafening screams that only I can hear?  I want so badly to not feel this way, yet it is the hand I was dealt and the house always wins. My head knows that the game is rigged but my heart refuses to fold and so I bet again. I never was any good at gambling.

I think we can all agree that I am not the self-help-book reading, mushy, love everyone type of person. I am actually the exact opposite. That said, I am just about through the book  Love Warrio r by Glennon Doyle, and never have I ever read something that has been a mirror reflection of myself, from the way I feel, to the way I think, to the way I behave. Love Warrior   is in no way a self help book. It's one woman's struggle with herself, her identity, how she interacts with the world, and how the world tells her she should interact with it. It is exactly everything that I feel and have ever felt, and I find myself saying "YES. YES!" on almost every page. I have always, always, always been a self conscious individual. I can remember being 4 years old and not knowing how to act, feeling inferior, incompetent, and painfully out of place. I retreated inside myself and put up this shy shell of an exterior that was "cute" when I was young, but as I aged preve...