Sharing your feelings is bullshit.
Everyone always talks about the importance of honesty. They talk and talk about how we should talk and talk, how we should expresses what we feel, what we want from other people, say what we think about people and talk about what they say about us makes us feel about them and about us. Especially in love relationships. They say if you can't share what you feel with the ones you love how can you be close? If you keep secrets or suppress your feelings from your lover then you're not really in love. All feelings, all put into words, all the time.
It's crap. In my experience talking about feelings always makes the feelings worse. Say someone says something that hurts my feelings. I feel bad. But they don't; they feel fine because they don't know they made me feel bad. Suppose I tell them how I feel. Now I still feel bad and they feel bad too. What can they do? They can't go back in time and undo the hurtful thing. They can apologize but that doesn't make them or me feel better because I knew they didn't mean to hurt me in the first place. Exchange my bruised ego for awkward silences.
Or say I have a longing, a stupid hopeless longing born of genuine and mutual passion. I feel bad because I know it cannot be, but if I express it I feel worse. Especially if it takes 18 agonizing minutes to reach Earth, and any reply will take another 18 minutes to return to Mars. If that were to happen the true depth of my despair would envelop and consume me. The other person would then have to cope with my painful desire, intensified by 36 minutes of shame and self-loathing at having expressed it. And when the answer finally came, and it's the inevitable shock and anger, nothing could ever be the same. I would have to reach down inside my own heart and squeeze it dry to stop the painful poison that would otherwise choke me to death.
And even now, sometimes I cry. I miss you, Ke.
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