Do you ever feel like you could say more than you do, but know that you can’t? In many of my conversations recently I’ve wanted to be blunter than usual. But in some cases, blunt isn’t always best. There are some people that have been in my life a long time and I have so much I wish I could tell them. They’ve grown to know me like I know myself, but there’s a voice inside me that I know if I said what’s on my mind it could ruin our friendships. It’s a type of self-censoring that’s essential, that’s crucial, that I know is right in the long run. But why does doing what’s right have to go against doing what I want?

In a perfect world, I’d speak my mind and things would work out the way that I want them to. But this world isn’t perfect. It isn’t even nearly close to perfect. And usually, when I speak my mind, it backfires. I don’t think there has been once a chance I’ve taken to speak my mind that has ended well. The concept of speaking out has always puzzled me. Being how I am, a realist, I weigh what it truly would imply, me speaking my mind.

What I’m so afraid of is rejection. Rejection of my ideas, that my thoughts and feelings aren’t reciprocated, that what I’m saying is radically different from what the current situation should be. But nine times out of ten, me speaking my mind, my reasoning behind it is to see where the other person in the conversation’s head is at. But these people, the ones I want to talk to, to ask the pressing questions inside my mind, the ones that have been bouncing around my brain for ages, I anticipate too much that the responses I’d get, they most likely wouldn’t be the ones that I hope for. So I say nothing.

I can’t help but think that if these thoughts are going through my head at the ninety-five miles per hour pace that they are, are the people I want to say them to not thinking them too? Even if they whizzed across their peripheral thought lines, these questions I wonder answers to and these feelings I’m feeling, they have to feel it to some extent too. I justify my feelings of being crazy and thinking unrealistic thoughts with the solace that it is two-sided and my wandering mind isn’t exclusive to me.

But I’m sitting here, lying wrapped tightly in a striped comforter staring at the plastic planets on my ceiling willing my eyelids to tire and shut and my body to lull itself into falling asleep. But as I’m sitting here, my mind is racing. It’s racing like a comet falling from orbit, on fire as it burns down to earth. It’s racing about my first-world problems, about confronting these people about these things I wish I could say, but in the current state of the world and recent stage of my life I feel like it wouldn’t be the right time and I would change the way I interact with them potentially for the worse than what I would want it to be.

And now, being locked up like Rapunzel, it’s not like I could run across the hall or street or country or world to track them down and discuss it in person. Because I’m isolated and all alone and this only makes my mind fly through thoughts even faster. The galaxy inside my brain is a star that exploded: dust and particles and pieces are everywhere, so disorganized and nothing has a place or knows what to do or say or where to go to make everything right again.

Things are finally somewhat good-ish for me. Or at the very least, calmer. So why is it that my mind won’t shut off and that it is becoming harder and harder for me to quiet the voice that wants to speak up? The voice that wants to say things that will change things for better or worse but can’t be spoken without risk or repercussion? Why is it that the gravity of what I want to say for me to know grows greater weight each day that passes?

Lying here, telling myself that silence is the best option, at least for now. Maybe time will change that. Maybe closing my eyes and slowing my mind will. For now, when the bright, burning comet of my thoughts reaches the ground, maybe my body will finally surrender to the darkness and serenity that comes with sleep.

This is a debate to be continued by future me.

goodnight,

M