{♥}
Talking about my feelings doesn’t come easy for me. At least, it doesn’t come easy in person.
You’ll be interested to know that the first time I expressed my feelings to E was through a letter. I’d written ‘love letters’ for all of my close friends for Valentine’s Day and figured he should get one as well. Being able to collect my thoughts and string together perfectly-worded sentences brought me comfort, the kind of comfort I can’t find in trying to express myself on the spot.
(That being said, I wasn’t even able to stay in the room while he read it because the vulnerability made me super uncomfortable.)
In an ideal world, I would communicate my deepest feelings via written letters forever, taking the time to compose my feelings into eloquent paragraphs. But this is the real world, and in the real world, we use our voices. Writing letters is nice, but sitting and talking face-to-face with someone is much more intimate and desired.
It’s slightly ironic that I have such a hesitancy to share my feelings with E since I have so many. My heart is full to the brim and it spills out onto the pages of my journal and occasionally here on my blog. Yet the idea of saying any of those things causes my brain to lock up and my ability to form coherent sentences to scamper away.
One reason for this is that my family never talked about emotions. We don’t say ‘I love you’ to one another, ever. Seriously. I couldn’t tell you the last time I told someone in my immediate family that I loved them. It’s not that I don’t, it’s just that it was a habit I was never taught and therefore never picked up.
The other reason is simply that being vulnerable scares the shit out of me.
All of this is to say that recently, for various reasons, I’m realizing it’s important to verbally express how I feel. A relationship can’t survive if the two people involved are incapable of communicating. As uncomfortable as I might feel, there are certain things written in my heart that he needs to hear. I keep running on some delusion that he 'just knows' how I feel and that needs to stop because it's likely untrue.
So here's to facing my fears, because every day that goes by without me saying a word is doing an injustice to our relationship, and I love him too much to let my fear get the best of me.
(Ten points if you know what the title's from!)
