Post 1: Self Reliance

"We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents."
-We are too scared to fully expose our true selves, to be left vulnerable to the world, so we never fully express that very essence of God within us.

There is a divine idea in all of us. God lives in all of us, in our souls. This is fundamentally who we are, it is our life force and it resides in the very depths of ourselves. It transcends our body and mind in its eternal nature. Whether our conciousness is lost with age, time, or death. The soul will live on. Each one of us has this essence and it is unique, else society would make all of the people of the world the same. From this comes emotion, felling, and expression. The latter of which wehave nearly full contorl of. Sometimes when feelings get too overwhelming that we temporarliy lose control of how much we express. We are able to hold back emotion and even use our mind and memory in order to create false emotions as actors do.
This brings us to Emerson's idea of half expressing ourselves. We choose what we want other people to see us express. This ability is both a good and bad thing. It is good in order to spare others from the possibly terrible feelings we are feeling and becasue it allows us to cheer people up and other such things. The good aspects center themselves aound interaction with other people. The mallous elements of this ability concentrate on the issue of our own individual emotional and mental health. For example we can tend to hold feeling back, in denial, and so unhealthy feeling can build up within. This is the half expression we as humans take part in quite frequently, varying from person to person.
The reason we only express part of ourselves is because we are ashamed and scared of what other people, society, and the world think of the divine idea. It leaves us so exposed and vulnerable but if you have strong self reliance (which is the subject of the essay) it should not matter, for you will be strong and selfconfident.