My mother once told me that my grandfather would write a letter if he was upset or irritated with someone. He would then put that letter in his drawer and hold on to it for a while before sending it to that person. It was a kind of quarantine/cooling period for the thoughts to make sure they really were what he wanted to say before sending them off. I’m pretty sure she told me this after having talked her ear off with an angsty childhood rant.
The take-home message from this object lesson was twofold. First, be positive that what you are communicating is what you really want to say. Second, be sure you are using the right medium. The first was obvious, the second came later when I realized that though mothers may love their children very much, they do not deserve to be subjected to hour-long unfocused tirades about teenage injustices with the frequency I dealt them.
In this age of instant communication where words can travel faster than ever before, in quantities greater than anyone could have ever imagined, it can be hard to tell what, when and how things should be shared. I’ve read some things online recently that should have been shared in a different format, at a different time if they should have even been shared at all. Reading things like that makes me second guess some of the content I have wanted to share and how I have wanted to share it. I have the ‘when’ but I’m missing the other two pieces.
There are a lot of things I want to share here for a great many reasons. Mainly my whole coming out story (yes, I’m agonizing about this again). I just worry about how it will be received and if it will accomplish anything remotely close to what I am hoping. Where the risk is great, the potential reward is greater. My problem is that I tend to be, for better or worse, a pretty risk-averse person and the idea of this blowing up in my face somehow is paralyzing.
I sometimes read other people’s stories and they leave me feeling depressed, angry, sad or dirty. That outcome is the exact opposite of what I want to achieve here. There may be some parts of the story which may be sad or frustrating the overall intent is show the journey I made to a positive and unexpected outcome from what seemed to be an impossible situation. I think that I can pull this off, I just have to buckle down and do it. It will just be important to listen carefully to feedback regarding the how, what and when of what I’m sharing to make sure I am communicating what I want to.
