You have to tell people how you feel because if you don’t, the ‘maybes’ and the ‘would-have-beens’ collect into a pile atop your heart and weigh there heavily, relentlessly, forever.

Because they taunt you in the dead of night – reminding you that there are so many lives you could be living, so many other people you could have become, if you only had been brave for just a moment. If you’d only spoken up once when it once mattered.

You have to tell people how you feel because you never know when it’s your last chance.

You never know when circumstances are just about to alter or the tide is just about to change or the door that is open to you now is about to slam itself shut.

You have to take the chances that you have while you have them, because every window of opportunity is held in place by a time frame and you can’t let it pass. You cannot resign yourself to staring bleakly out of it, wondering, for the rest of your life.

You have to tell people how you feel because it matters like hell.

Because there are so many things in life that don’t – what you’re wearing and where you’re living and whichever petty problems plague your awareness day in and day out.

You have to tell people how you feel because when your time on earth draws to a close and you look back over everything that counted, it is always going to be about people. Who you held onto. Who you grew with. Who changed you and challenged you and inspired you, when everything around you was falling apart.

You have to tell people how you feel because you will hate yourself if you do not.

Because the longer you spend ignoring your own values and desires, the more you begin to resent yourself.

The more you second-guess yourself. The more you belittle yourself. The more you start thinking of yourself as someone who is meek and uncertain and incapable of going after what you want out of this life. And that script becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. That mantra becomes the very thing that holds you back.

You have to tell people how you feel, because it’s not just about them feeling the same thing back.

Because harnessing mutual love is a wonderful side effect of courage, but it’s not the end goal. The end goal is becoming a badass and a risk-taker. The end goal is living authentically. The end goal is becoming someone who can meet their own gaze in the mirror each morning, because you’re unafraid to fight for your own happiness.

You have to tell people how you feel because it’s the only way to live out your truth.

And at the end of the day, that might be the most important thing you ever learn to do.