Young & Oversharing is a weekly newsletter for young women figuring it out one mistake at a time. For laughs, lessons and uh-huh moments every Thursday, sign up here:
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This Week’s Oversharer’s Spotlight: Shoutout to Oishika Ray who bought me two coffees! Thank you so much. I appreciate your support. Sending you bear hugs and tonnes of love!
"You are treating your relationships the same way you treat your work. There is a process and a set outcome for your projects which you like. You are trying to apply the same logic to relationships, but the fact that you can't predict the outcome is frustrating you. As a result, you hold back out of fear. You are pouring half a jar of love onto your loved ones. That isn't fair to you or the people you love, is it?" - My Therapist.
What are you doing with the half-filled jar you aren't pouring out, Oversharer?
I know what I am doing with mine. I am holding it hostage. I am using it to buffer myself just in case I get heartbroken. I want to say, 'At least I didn't give you all my love.' But the reality is that it won't hurt any less. That half-filled jar will sit on the shelf and rot away. It is not a remedy for my pain, and I can't pass it on to the next person who comes into my life, either. My store room is furnished with half-filled jars, and I convince myself they are trophies. Yet the truth is, they represent my brokenness. Sad, right?
We don't have the time we think that we have. That's a fact. So why are we so hellbent on wasting it on fear? We fear to love. We fear to trust. We fear to try. I think it's because we mistake defence for healing.
When a new person walks into our lives, we immediately think, 'I am not making the same mistakes I made before.' That's all we need to kick ourselves into defence mode. Unfortunately, the lesson we are referencing is loving wholeheartedly. It's giving the person a fair chance and trusting them. It's letting our guard down and living in the moment.
Instead, defence takes centre stage, and we show up withdrawn, suspicious, indifferent, and unimpressed. Nothing is good enough, and nothing feels true. We become impossible to please. And then, when they leave, we shout, 'I knew it.'
You knew you would sabotage yourself out of love? Cause baby, you did. Now you have a new half-filled jar with their name on it rotting away on your shelf. There is no victory walk in this story because you cheated yourself out of an experience and punished someone who did nothing but try. You lost.
This time, let's try something different. Let's try healing. Healing means getting into the battlefield with our childhood trauma to silence the voice that says, 'You aren't worthy of being loved.' It means relearning beliefs that don't limit us. It also means taking responsibility for the part we played in hurting ourselves until we believed we were unworthy.
I hope the next time you find love, you empty the jar. And IF it doesn't work out, you remove the label, rinse it clean and refill it for the next person. In this era, we love, we heal, and we love all over again.
To emptying jars and loving wholeheartedly. *clink clink*
Help me produce Y&O Podcast
If you love and enjoy Y&O please help me produce the Y&O Podcast! Recording is fun, editing and producing is costly and I would appreciate your help. I am looking to launch the podcast in April 2025, fingers crossed. To help me, you can Buy Me a Coffee, believe me when I say every Coffee counts. Or you can hire me to design a website or write for you. Thanks, bye!
LOVE THIS. So simple but so powerful.