A year ago I was a different person. It may sound cliché but in this case, it is true. It was true for many reasons. For one I was less confident within myself, and also always needed to be validated by someone or something just to feel good. The most important thing that changed though is my outlook on how I express myself and knowing that how I act was normal for anyone going through rough times to act.

A year ago I met someone who I thought I clicked with. I was battling many things when I met him and the biggest battle was my mental health. My anxiety was bad to where I would have episodes of anxiety while I was at work, but of course, no one knew at the time since I was always good at playing it cool.

Unfortunately, this also made way for a lot of deceit and manipulation. Every feeling I was expressing no matter how extreme it was would always end up with me being labeled as crazy and unstable. After that relationship had ended I thought I was the main one who was in the wrong for the longest time, and I thought that he was this good guy I lost because of my inability to control my inner thoughts and emotions.

As months went on I slowly realized that I was not the bad person I was portrayed as, but instead, I was manipulated into thinking I was this crazy psychotic person. This realization did nothing but made me angrier at first. I felt like I was defeated and weak for falling for someone's opinions about me and what I was experiencing. I felt angry at the person who leads me to believe that my feelings were unstable which also caused me to contemplate on committing suicide.

All these months I was made to believe that being anxious was unstable, getting mad meant I was crazy, and the list can go on. I spent months wanting to end it all because I was made to believe that since I was "unstable" everyone just tolerated me and I was unloved. After leaving the relationship and the toxic thinking I realized that everything I was made to believe was completely wrong.

I learned that everyone is entitled to expressing their feelings, and as long as it is being channeled in a healthy way, everyone is entitled to have different kinds of emotions. In life, we are given various colors to paint our world, and even our vision is given the ability to see these various colors (unless you are color-blind of course). The colors we see in our world is also the color we see in our hearts, but instead of seeing the inner colors you feel those colors.

In life, you are given various kinds of colors, or in this case emotions. As people get older and explore all the colors that they can paint their inner world, they also have a choice of which colors to keep and which to throw out. In my case, my last partner was dull. He only had one color and there was nothing new to see and no matter how much I tried to paint his world with a new color it would always stay the same.

For me, it is totally different. No color goes to waste and every day is a new picture or pattern and every color is used at least once in my lifetime.

In context, as humans, we have a choice to pick and choose the emotions we want to express. Some people may have a set of emotions they use in their lifetime, or like me, some will have a wild personality and use every emotion existent to mankind at least once. The people you have to avoid are the kinds of people who do not have a lot of emotions, because every time you paint an emotion you are feeling to that person, they do nothing but paint over those emotions you worked hard on feeling to where your mind, and soul will become a blank canvas.

Emotions are like our inner canvas that we are free to use. Always share the colors that you paint yours and encourage others to share theirs, because at the end of the day emotions create a beautiful work of art.