There is a virtue in knowing when to hold your tongue. There are moments in your life that will incite a hurricane of emotions so powerful, that the words spurred by the storm raging inside have the same devastating impact on those around you as a natural disaster. There will also be moments when you recognize that the destructive forces of an emotional cyclone are disproportionate to the situation and that choosing not to hurl the first anger-induced thought into the wind is to everyone's benefit. Mastery of the latter is a skill that comes through practice and earnest effort. For me, it became something that I practiced so often that it turned into a bad habit. There is a virtue in knowing when to hold your tongue, but there is peace in knowing when to speak your truth.

Do not mistake passivity for peace-keeping and allow yourself to be carried on waves of conversation without contributing your true thoughts. When you are not honest with the world, you cannot be honest with yourself. Positive self-perception in relation to your place in the world is deeply connected to internal security. If you find yourself suppressing your personal truth in interaction for the sake avoiding confrontation or because it's the path of least resistance, I guarantee that your inner peace will be disturbed by the conflict of resenting those you haven't told your true feelings to and dissatisfaction with yourself.

In my own experience with biting my cheek in the moments when I really had something to say, instead of allowing the clouds that had rolled in with the conflict to dissipate afterward, they continued to loom over me in the shape of the words I swallowed out of consideration for everyone but myself. Those words reverberated in my head like the incessant "pings" of hail hitting the inside my skull, reminding me that I was agonizing over how to resolve a disagreement that the other party wasn't even aware of. The clouds and the hail would remain present in my life, making me colder to those around me, and would only disappear after I unleashed a cold snap that left loved ones with watery eyes from the icy blast which released me from my seasonal depression.

There is a time for everything; times to listen and times to speak. Just as much as we emphasize thinking before we open our mouths to talk, we need to comprehend the importance of saying what we feel before the moment is gone and we're left holding a bag of unexpressed emotions. For the sake of your relationships and inner peace, learn how to be considerate not by holding your tongue, but by saying what you really feel when you feel it, and saying it with tact.