Texting. The greatest, necessary evil of this generation. Love it or hate it, chances are you've sent a text message or two today, heck maybe you're texting in the midst of reading this article #multitasking.
I, just like most millennials, send an innumerable amount of texts a day. They can range from one letter to multiple paragraphs--in MLA format. I text my friends, my acquaintances, my mom, and even my grandma. It's quick, easy, and seemingly painless. But what about when someone doesn't read the sarcasm in my words? Or mistakes my period at the end of my sentence as anger?
I've had many arguments spring up because of a misread text. The hard truth is, you can't read a screen. You can't see the person's facial expressions or their body language. You can't hear their pitch or how loud they're speaking. There's no true emotion involved with texting. I guess that's why people seem to be resorting to it more and more for the hard things, and even the intimate ones.
We're a generation full of people who are passive aggressive and terrified of anything that comes close to resembling confrontation. We ghost, we like, we text. We surround ourselves with barriers so we don't have to actually deal with people. We try to protect ourselves from the hurt that they could inflict on us.
I get, it's easier. Surface relationships are easier. Feelings are scary. It's like our childhood phobia of cooties never really went away, it just evolved. We decided that we did in fact like the opposite sex, but not necessarily the things that can come with them.
Trust me when I say, the surface may be easier, but real is so much better. It took me a long time to assemble my "squad"--for lack of a way better term. I liked to keep my friends just a little bit farther them arm's length away. But then one day I opened up to a human. And then I opened up to another one. And so on, and so forth. I found people who I could not only talk to or hang out with occasionally but people who did life with me, who took care of me, who loved me.
I realized that my obsession with hiding behind texting and walls was not keeping me safe, it was keeping me from experiencing true relationship. This is not to say that I haven't still been burned by people and I've completely eradicated my trust issues, but it's progress.
Texting is a wondrously, dangerous gift. It makes talking to people quick and seemingly painless. In reality, it can leave an even bigger hole in someone's heart than real words sometimes. We like to live our lives on our phones, we like to hide behind them. But I promise you, real life, is so much better than on your iPhone. Don't let your life be defined my a piece of glass and metal. Let it be defined by the moments you live, and the word you say (out loud).
