“I never knew you felt that way.”
He texted me this after reading the letter I had handwritten and mailed to him. It was circa 2007 and I hadn’t even lived here in NYC for a whole year yet. Keshia Cole’s ‘Just Like You’ album was in heavy rotation on my iPod. I was dating a young man and he had been dishonest with me about some things that I felt deeply hurt by. Back then when I was upset with someone, I’d shut down and ladle servings of the silent treatment.
I’d iced him out. He wanted to talk, but I wasn’t accepting or returning his calls yet. I wrote him a letter instead to pour out my heart.
It’s cliche, but an action I wish I had taken once was telling a young man face to face how I felt and about him.
When it came time to talk about real feelings, I could never find the words to tell him to his face. Instead, I wrote him letters with my carefully curated thoughts.
I was afraid that if I shared how I really felt face to face, that I would fall apart and look foolish. And most importantly, that my feelings would be too much and scare him off. My fear based thinking thought he couldn’t be scared away if I never rocked the boat. I used to abandon so much of myself at times to please and hold onto others.
In hindsight, he was very lost. A young man working through a lot of things that happened before me and had nothing to do with me, but impacted how he’d treat and interact with me. That didn’t leave much room for him to be present and align with good possibilities that could have been between us. And my inability at the time to really share how I was feeling didn’t help foster a healthy and genuine relationship either.
Sharing my feelings in real time and in person with him would not have saved our relationship. He simply wasn’t the right guy for me. But it would have done something for me.
I didn’t believe that my voice or feelings mattered then. I didn’t think that I could express myself “right” speaking my feelings in real time. So I said little or resorted to letters.
I’m very eloquent and clear with written word, but it became an enabler for avoiding important conversations with people that I cared about and were important to me. My resistance to being vulnerable damned my ability to foster connections beyond surface levels because I was so afraid of people leaving me if I was.
How ironic that my lack of vulnerability with others often resulted in the very thing I feared, them “leaving” me. They didn’t know how I felt. No one was a mind reader. And you can’t try to change or act on what you don’t know.
What I’d do differently with that young man was, honestly, choose myself.
I would’ve sat in the discomfort and talked to him. I would have poured my heart out and I would have accepted that it probably wasn’t ever going to work. But not talking to him wouldn’t have prevented it from not working either.
Telling him how I felt would have reinforced that my feelings mattered and people that truly cared about and had capacity for me, would want to know how I’m feeling and not knowingly disrespect me. And, who knows, maybe if I had let him know, he would have had a chance to do something different with that awareness. He could have decided if he had capacity to engage with and treat me differently or not.
I still don’t think he would have though. Lol. But, hey, we’ll never know because it played out the way that it did. *shrugs*
What about you? Is there something you didn’t take action on that you wish you had? What would you do differently?
Milan Noelle 
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