The Open Letter,

I was going to write you one final time to say something that’s really been on my mind lately. Please stop giving people the opportunity to not tell people how they feel. Please stop letting people use you as a passive aggressive cop-out. Please stop being a trend in a society that tells us it’s OK to not tell people how we feel to their faces, but instead, write about them for the whole world to see our selfishness and bitterness.

But the blame can’t be fully on you and for that I apologize. I apologize that you were created by a human race that is constantly looking for ways to get around the truth. We “subtweet” and imply all kinds of speculations. We write open letters and talk about people and issues behind their backs. We never just tell people how it is. And we’re cowards for that. So instead of writing open letters to that boy who treated us like shit or that friend who stabbed us in the back or to the people who mean the most to us, why don’t we just tell them?

They won’t learn from their actions if they have no idea how much they affect people. How deeply their actions cut and resonate and damage. And reading an open letter to my shitty boyfriend isn’t going to make him realize that he was a shitty person. We have to be honest and that’s why I’m telling you goodbye, because there was once a time for passivity and a non-confrontational spirit, but not anymore. This is a time for honesty. For raw emotion and for the bare use of human interaction that we've so plainly lost.

I know it’s not always easy to tell people how we really feel, because when we vocalize it, it makes it more real. It makes it real that we were hurt or heartbroken. It makes it real that our friends left us or that our parents didn't care or that we had to deal with situations in life that we were never intended to.

So we don’t only use open letters to let everyone know how we’re feeling, we write them to protect ourselves. Because when it’s an open letter, when the receiver and writer are anonymous, when the situation is not in context, we convince ourselves that maybe it didn’t really happen to us. Maybe it happened to someone else.

But there comes a time when we have to face the facts and when we have to stop lying to ourselves, because there’s no other way we’re going to learn from it.

Life happens and yes, sometimes it sucks. It hurts. It stings. But we can’t let that make us bitter.

But also yes, it’s hard sometimes to be vulnerable to the people we care about the most. It’s hard to tell our college roommate that we couldn’t live without them or that our parents are the best people on the face of this planet or that our older sister is our hero. It’s hard to verbalize those things, but if we don’t, they may never know how important they are to us. They may not understand that that “open letter” was written about them.

And that’s what matters at the end of the day, being honest to each other and being honest to ourselves. Growing from our pain. Verbalizing how we feel and accepting it. And if we can accomplish that, there will be no vagueness or questions when we reflect back on our lives. We won't have to question if people knew how we felt. We'll just know.

So as a final farewell, you've been a good excuse.

But I'm tired of making them.