The drive for self-expression is an ancient and innate hunger, and the health of mind and body depend on it.

Passions unlived, creative urges stifled, and truths unspoken are self-expressions that are being suppressed.

Start with the subtlest impulses to express yourself, and build from there.

“If you ask me what I came into this world to do, I will tell you. I came to live out loud.” —Emile Zola

I met a young man some years ago who told me that he’d always wanted to be a teacher and speaker, but spent so many years “biting my tongue” that he literally had a pronounced scar on the tip of his tongue, like a big callous, from where he’d bitten it repeatedly.

Whether your own yearning for self-expression involves teaching, dancing, leadership, community-building, or running a restaurant, the hunger is the same: to get what’s on the inside out. To make the invisible visible, to speak your mind, to let your cats out of the bag. And you’re driven to sate this innate hunger to be true to yourself as the most naturally expressive of creatures, for the sheer pleasure and self-satisfaction of it, and to make contact with the larger hive—to be heard, seen, witnessed.

In a sense, everything you do is an expression of who you are, from the shoes you wear to the way you raise your children, spend your time, solve your problems, react to suffering or joy, and do the work you do. The question is, are these expressions of who you really are, which is a centrifugal force pushing out from within, a bird flapping against its cage?

When performance artist Nina Wise asks students what........

© Psychology Today