Nothing haunts us like the things we don’t say

“Go on, Bron, you do it,” my friend urges me. “You’ll know what to say.”

And so I go, and so it goes.

There are very few times in my life where I haven’t said what I want to say. There have been many, many times where my “filter” works better than others and I think carefully about what I want to say and then I say it. But there have been lots of times where I’ve just blurted out what’s in my head because I want to talk about it. I’m so itchingly curious about the different ways people do things that I figure they must be just as fascinated to talk about things as I am…

I spent my late teens with my head in ‘self-help’ books, absorbing everything from Susan Jeffers to Richard Carlson to Stephen Covey to Thomas Harris to… well, you get the idea. I don’t know how much of any of these books I absorbed as a self-conscious, wondering teen, but I do know that I’ve never again picked up a self-help book thinking it had the answers. The only thing I knew was that a book wasn’t going to help me find what I was looking for. Only an open heart, a curious mind and the courage to ask could do that.

I studied psychology at uni for four years (it was meant to be three, but I didn’t turn up for my end of year exams in my ‘first final year’ because… I was an idiot) and this I know: we are all seekers. We are all learners. I’ve never been self-conscious about asking people barely formulated questions to find the hardly known answers. Talking about these things are why we are here. My vulnerability in asking, yours in answering, mine in listening, yours in asking, mine in answering and so it goes. A shared, circular truth that makes us whole. The truth that spins the world around.

“Go on, Bron, you do it,” my friend urges me. “You’ll know what to say.”

I do know what to say. I say, I genuinely want to learn why we are different, why we are similar, why we are the same. Why do you do the things you do and why don’t I do them that way? Where do you go when you do what you do and why am I left behind? What do you gain when you do something like that and what can I learn from you? When and where and what and who and how and why, why, why.

I want to be wide open when I ask so you will see that there is nothing inside us to hide. Wide open so the light gets in.

I want to show you the sides of yourself that are hidden from you, but I can see.

I want to know the sides of myself that I hide from me, but that you can plainly see.

I’ll do it. I’ll know what to say.

Do you say the things you want to say?