I'm not very good at talking about my feelings, so I write about them instead. There is something inherently terrifying to me about the idea of sitting down with someone and just being honest. I know that this is something that many people experience, and the advice that's thrown around a lot (including by me) is to USE YOUR WORDS! But that's just a lot easier to say than it is to do, isn't it? It still paralyses me a little bit to talk about some things, even though in writing, I can say (and indeed, have said) a lot of what I need, and what I want to say.
But there are some things that you can't really just stick a blog post up about.
Being able to tell your friends that you're petrified of losing them, being able to tell people you love them, tell people that you're in love with them, be able to talk to the people you want to talk to about the things you want to tell them - even that's hard. Just starting a conversation. I genuinely really struggle with this sort of thing. There is something that eats away at me when I try and talk about this stuff.
So I've come up with a little project - something I'm going to try to do over the next year or so, to be able to talk to the people I want to talk to, without an instant response, and using writing so that I don't have to internally panic every time I open my mouth and just spew out a load of words that don't mean anything, or worse! Just not say ANYTHING AT ALL! Oh god the awkward...
I'm going to start writing letters - this is something I really want to do, and I feel like putting it on here will actually make me do it. As well as this being an easy form of communication for me, I think it's a great way to add personality into communicating. It takes longer than an iMessage, or an email, it won't arrive instantly, and people won't respond as soon as they see it. I think that's part of the beauty of it - you can send something saying everything you want to say, but without the crippling anxiety of starting at that little tick waiting for the other person's response.
This is something that's likely to always be hard for me. I don't really know how to talk to people about deeply personal things, but somehow writing everything out helps me think everything through and seems so much less scary, so maybe, that's where I need to start?
Always nervous about something...
AJ
