When It Comes To Speaking Your Mind, Timing Is Everything

It’s practical to say timing is everything. Consider confessing your feelings to someone you like. Say something too early and you might come across too keen and eager, almost wanting to rush the things that need time. Say something a little too late and you end up watching your chance fade. Words can be as meaningless as a phrase, but they can easily be defined when completed as a sentence.

The timing we choose to say what we have in mind can spur a change in us and the system we belong into. Change is like gravity. When we are changing—and we will constantly be doing so—the earth is no longer responsible for holding us down. Change does. We become whatever it needs us to be, regardless of at what or whose expense. It’s all part of the process, and our words play a vital part in this.

It seems all I have done in the past few months is change. I saw my state of behavior take a left turn at 2 a.m. because of a guy I dated on Valentine’s. I saw how my world sort of eclipsed with his. But I also saw how it ended so abruptly by design, fate, or weird happenstance.

More painfully, I also saw how newly built platonic relations crumbled like sandcastles.

The words we choose and the tone by which we wrap it with have the disobliging power to direct our courses in life. What we say may come across as too much for others. Maybe it will come out not in the fashion we intended it to and we will walk away feeling embarrassed. We will wince while replaying what we said in our heads. Words are powerful, especially those left unsaid; the words you didn’t say are the ones powerful enough to haunt you longer. And they will hurt us in the way they know how.

As a result, we encounter moments where we sleep at past midnight because we spend a considerable amount of time replaying the words we said, or the words our colleagues or boss said, which threw us off balance and into a cavernous pit of melancholy. Everything is replaying like a mixtape that never ends.

It’s hard to revisit those episodes and consider why they mattered. Subconsciously, there are things we wish we didn’t say. Maybe if we didn’t, we could have been saved from all these anxieties and self-pity. But at one point, those words were the truth, and we couldn’t bring ourselves to fully regret the decision to let them out because it brought us closer to the things and people we wanted to gravitate to. 

Looking at it now, there were things I wish I could have done differently. On the other hand, I know the universe has a reason for all of these. Whatever that is, time can only tell.

Timing. Words. Change. Three different words. But put them together and they have the power to catapult us in a journey no one could have prepared us for. For whatever it’s worth, change should be embraced rather than be feared. Maybe change is necessary for us to build ourselves. Maybe change is preparing us for the permanent things in life by removing the temporary ones.