Last year, when I started my journey to becoming more authentic and real, the very first trait I thought I should embody was openness. Thinking that in order to be authentic, one should hide nothing; show themselves fully; to wear my heart on my sleeve, to say what’s on my heart and mind openly.

A year and several awkward moments later I know I had it all wrong. Many times, openness led to more misunderstanding than connection.

I needed to reflect on this a bit deeper this week because my heart had so much to say to someone but it knew it shouldn’t. While honesty is a great trait and could clear the air and foster trust in many situations, it can also cause damage when brought at a wrong time, with the wrong person or in the wrong way.

Now all of this is common sense, but what is openness then? What is openness in the context of authenticity, vulnerability and femininity?

Like many others, when I hear the word ‘to open’ I think of a door or a window. I imagine myself on a sunny spring morning, unlocking the shutters of a window and opening it outwards to the world.

But why outwards? What if I flip the window in my imagination into one that opens inwards?

That changes the whole story. Openness then becomes receptivity and not generosity.

Does this contradict with authenticity or allowing the real me to be seen? And why did this internal shift guide me to reimagine my window of openness?

Perhaps because I started noticing something subtle: when a window opens outwards, it exposes everything inside the room to whoever happens to pass by. But when it opens inwards, it allows the fresh air and sunlight to enter first. The room receives before it reveals.

And maybe that is what true openness is meant to be.

Authenticity does not necessarily mean narrating every thought or emotion that passes through our mind. Sometimes authenticity is simply being aligned within ourselves, knowing what we feel, recognising it, honouring it, even if we choose not to express it aloud.

There is a quiet strength in that kind of openness.

It is the ability to listen more deeply, to observe, to sense what the moment actually requires. Sometimes the most authentic thing we can do is to hold a feeling gently within us until the right time, the right place, or the right person appears.

I’m starting to see that openness is less about speaking and more about allowing. Allowing life to reach us. Allowing people to reveal themselves. Allowing wisdom to rise before words do.

And perhaps femininity carries a special relationship with this inward opening, the kind that receives, processes, and transforms before offering something back to the world.

So the window remains open… but now it opens inward first.

And strangely enough, the room feels calmer that way.