# @kaaestrel on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/C5nLfy7OHXN
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/17798920-kaaestrel-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/postThumbnails/87cc25c196.jpg
- **Posted:** 2024-04-11T07:05:47.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** ✨kaela belingon (@kaaestrel) — https://gondola.cc/kaaestrel

## Caption

My mother told me that I wouldn’t be successful with the kind of personality I had.

She said that I would have to work “twice, no- more than twice” as hard.

I’m starting to think she was right.

It’s not just the writing. It’s in everything I do. Everything that involves having to put myself out there. To be perceived by a million prying eyes. Those eyes that condemn you to judgement within fraction of that heartbeat of mine, pounding against my very bones ever so fiercely that it might just jump out of my chest right there, in front of everyone.

Too much?

Too bad.

Because that is my reality.

I don’t expect everyone to understand me. But I expect everyone to give me grace even when I think I don’t deserve it. I think I never do.

But to know that I could have been great or as worshipped if what little talents I had were not hindered by the fear that are those millions of eyes… I trail off here. How do I put this in words?

It infects me with envious poison. It shatters my bones under this, my own burden. It drives a stake through my heart from the eyes that know.

It kills me.

Even now as I write as if the letters on the page can remedy me, I do not find solace in this craft. What pride and pleasure I had from playing as Creator is swallowed by the sea that is my sorrows of knowing: There will always be countless creations that surpass mine.

But now, what keeps my bubbles of knowledge and vision from rising to the surface is the shadow of anxiety that I can never seem to control. It swims alongside me, and I, with what I believed was endless breath, watch as it pops each bubble of life from my lips.

Like a mischievous child, playful, needy, and irritating. The shadow is my own but I do not control where it goes.

I am running out of breath.

~kb

## Stats

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- **Likes:** 72
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## Tags

ncsustudyabroad, trecimedilavaredo, fantasyphotography, italy, cortinadampezzo, photoshoot, dolomiti, hiking, englishmajor, landscapephotography, italia, photography, lorenzodemedici, dolomites

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