For the past four semesters, I have been head over heels for this guy and I never really told him how I felt. That was until about two weeks ago. He is, well was (I’m actually not really sure where we stand at this moment) my best friend. I could say and do just about anything without any judgment. I mean anything, I have three stages of anger, and lets just say he survived phase three and handled it very gracefully.
I don’t think I am a shy person, I pretty much say whatever I’m thinking, but is very rare that I say what I’m feeling. If someone is doing something that I think is stupid or is a bad idea, I will say it. A lot of times people will say, “read the room” to kind of get a sense of what the right thing is to say, but I don’t do that. I’m the person who says what everyone else is thinking, but I’m also the one who gets in trouble for it since I’m the only one who said it. However, when it comes to feelings, I don’t really know what to say. When my grandmother passed, my roommate asked me how I was doing and I said, “I just think I’m going to have ramen”. It has been over a year since my grandmother has passed, and I can’t say that I have ever talked about how I feel about it. The point is, I just suck at expressing emotions.
As the semester winded down, I decided that I had waited to long to tell my friend that I had feelings for him. Since I lacked skill in expressing my emotions, when the time came, I froze up. Well, not exactly. When I get nervous, I do this thing where I just laugh, and that’s exactly what I did, for fifteen minutes straight. We were in a car, and the drive was fifteen minutes long. I laughed the entire drive.
Anyway, instead of telling him with words verbally, I wrote him a note telling him how I felt. I didn’t really talk to him about it, I kind of laughed and drove away. To this day we still haven’t talked about it, but that was the biggest risk I’ve ever taken.
I think it was a risk because I never tell people how I feel. If something bad happens, like my grandmother, I just don’t say anything. Even when good things happen, like when I joined my sorority, my mom asked me how I felt about it, and I said, “it’s cool” even though I was really nervous. It was a risk because for once I was putting myself out there instead of having my feelings locked up in a tower like Rapunzel.
Even though it was risk for me, I don’t regret it. Putting myself out there was the best thing I could have done because I let him know how I felt, and he could either feel the same, which would be good. And if not, oh well. It was the best risk because now I never have to wonder, “what if I had told him how I felt?”