The art of leaving things unsaid can be harder than it sounds. Have you ever written out a really long text to send to someone, read it over a million times, just to delete the whole thing? Maybe you were angry. Maybe you were hurt. Maybe you had so much to say that it overwhelmed you so much you just kept typing. You wanted them to understand why you were hurt, why you were angry. But after reading the message again and again, you realized that maybe sending it wasn’t going to change anything. So you deleted it. Not because you had nothing to say, but because maybe you didn’t need to say everything. Because sometimes, saying everything won’t change anything.Â
We Think Everything Needs an Explanation
As humans, we always feel a need to explain everything. Why we are ending a friendship, why we stopped responding, why we are upset. Is it to feel understood? To make sure the other party knows there are no hard feelings? Sometimes explaining everything makes things more confusing; in college, all of the relationships in our lives are changing. Our friendships, both with those from home and new people we meet in college, are always evolving. People grow apart not because of anything bad that happened, but just because we are no longer that much alike.Â
It’s an interesting distance that’s put between you and your relationships from home, both your family and others. Not because you don’t care about each other, but because they don’t know you the way they once did. You come home, and it feels like you live a double life. You aren’t the same person you were senior year of high school anymore, but for some reason it feels like you’ve teleported back to the past. That’s how people back home remember you, and that’s okay. You are different now, not bad, just different. So instead of overexplaining everything, show them who you have become.Â
But You Don’t Always Need to Explain Yourself
“Some things are better left unsaid.” We have all heard this quote a million times, and while it makes perfect sense, when it’s time to apply it to our actual lives, the task seems so daunting. Because what if their perception of me is different if I don’t tell them everything? What we don’t realize is that sometimes saying everything won’t change anything.Â
Save your energy. Quit over-explaining yourself, trying to make everyone see every side of the story. Because sometimes, no matter how much breath you use or how much time you put into explaining yourself, they won’t understand you. So let it be.
Silence Doesn’t Always Mean You Don’t Care
I think the hardest thing for us to do as people is stay silent because most of the time that is seen as a lack of care. In actuality, the silence can mean you’re protecting your peace, or that you’ve accepted that the situation won’t change, maybe even that you are just choosing not to argue. It’s okay to stay silent to keep yourself out of a situation you know will hurt you.
The Things We Don’t Say Still Matter
There will always be something we wish we would have said, things we wish people would understand without needing to state them out loud. People often replay conversations in their head and imagine how they should have gone, what they should have said. This actually has a name: Counterfactual thinking. Basically, it’s when we imagine how a situation could have gone differently: “If I had just said X, then Y would have happened”. Whilst it’s important to reflect on situations and conflict, it can be unhealthy to dwell on “what ifs”. It can keep you stuck in the past.
Knowing When to Walk Away
Leaving something unsaid isn’t always an act of avoidance or a lack of communication. Sometimes it’s about recognizing that you’ve already communicated your side enough. It’s the recognition that no matter what you say next, the situation isn’t going to change. This is the hardest part of it all, because once we do walk away, that is when the counterfactual thinking begins. When we start to wonder if the situation would be different if we had just said one more thing. The art of leaving things unsaid can be difficult to learn. There are times when silence, walking away, and choosing not to explain everything can feel a lot like closure.
Sometimes, Silence Is the Closure
You don’t have to say everything you are thinking or feeling for those emotions to be real. Sometimes the paragraph you typed up in your notes needs to stay there. Sometimes the conversation that never happened didn’t happen for a reason.Â
And that’s okay. You’re still okay. Because maybe that’s just the art of leaving things unsaid.