What if everything you’ve been hiding are your secret strengths?

When you look inside and learn to embrace what you see, then you heal. Then you change.

Bella Martin
4 min readJan 26, 2024

What if everything you’ve been hiding are your secret strengths? What if there was never anything wrong with your softness or your boldness, your gentleness or your strength, your desire for closeness or your drive to go your own way? What if by trying to cut out different pieces of you, you only dimmed their light and amplified their shadows?

Maybe you are emotionally sensitive but in trying to embody a societal standard of strength you have swallowed so much shame that you have stripped your ability to experience the depths of any emotion, especially joy. Maybe you are highly intuitive but in order to fit between the lines that other people have drawn you began to ignore your natural knowing of who you are and what you want until not even you are sure anymore.

Perhaps you are naturally opinionated but to avoid social rejection you learned how to make yourself small and now you can’t tell the difference between what you actually think and what you have always been told you should. The ways we hide ourselves become the identities that imprison us. The parts of ourselves we think we have to control or extinguish are often exactly where we…

--

--

Bella Martin

Words of healing, hope & happiness. | Find me on instagram @bellamwrites