The Intense Girl

I’m kind of an intense person. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love having fun and being carefree but at my core I’m a deeply feeling, intuitive, and empathetic being. Personally, I don’t feel there is anything wrong with that, but I also don’t always feel comfortable with those parts of myself because I don’t think others are comfortable with them.

I write a lot of poetry and short stories and I rarely feel comfortable enough to share them with people. When I do share my writings, I immediately feel a knot in the pit of my stomach and my mind starts reeling. ‘Shit, shit, shit… they must think I’m depressed and scary or something.’ Generally, when I share my personal work it’s with a pen name because I don’t want people to look at me any differently. I also feel constantly as if people tell me to ‘calm down’ or ‘lighten up’ and if I’m being completely honest, it pisses me off so much yet I continue to let them say it.

What makes it so wrong to be a deep thinker? I like that I have an emotional range, I’m not a fucking robot. We as human beings cannot be expected to live in the world we do and not have an opinion or care about the other people who share this living, breathing earth with us. So, why do my ‘intense’ thoughts tend to make me so uncomfortable around other people?

Recently, a friend told me that they wanted to know people’s initial opinions or thoughts about them. I immediately disagreed, already terrified they were going to tell me something about myself I didn’t want to hear. Maybe people I meet think that I’m a little bit weird or a buzzkill or whatever. All I knew at that moment was that I was way too scared to know what other people thought about me and for what?

I’ve lived a lot of my life being the girl people wanted me to be on the outside while the inside me was slowly disintegrating away into nothing. I was the happy go lucky, always smiling, carefree ‘nothing bothered me’ girl. This past year, though, I have come to accept that I’m intense, I live within my own head, I over analyze things and while I might not be the ‘jealous’ type, I still get upset and bothered sometimes. I’m trying to live my life authentically and give myself a real experience and I know in order to do that I am probably going to have to open myself to other people’s opinions and sometimes those opinions may hurt me.

So, where do I begin. How do I let myself be, well, myself and not care if people are turned off by that? This is something that’s going to take work and with societal stigmas still surrounding women who aren’t always happy it’s probably going to suck sometimes but, it’s important enough to me to begin embracing myself. What’s the saying? ‘Haters gonna hate’. And as for me, well, at least I’m going to be free.

by Colleen O’Connor

Originally published at obviweretheladies.com on December 21, 2015.