“Do you know what I wanted to say? I wanted to say something along the lines of “I miss you and I’ve thought about you every day since I left.” And that was the truth, you know? Of course, that’s not what I ended up saying, but in that moment, I realized that this was what my book is about: it is about the idea—the tragedy —that we can never bring ourselves to say the things we want to say as often as we need.
We spend much of our lives practicing our social skills and we’ve been conditioned, in some ways, to think that there’s a time and a place for everything we could possibly want to say. We’re concerned about how others might react if we let them know how we feel in what we perceive as the wrong context. So we hold it all in. And, as a result, we will never say the wrong thing at the wrong time—we will never have moments of awkwardness. We can avoid those moments that can seem devastating when they happen… But we also miss out on the chance to connect with people. We miss out on the chance to tell others how they’ve affected our lives. We miss out on the chance that they might feel the same way about us. “
-Jon Wong
Thought Catalogue
