Say It

Recently something occurred to me as I was galavanting around Ripon with my cousins, taking group selfies and enjoying each other's company. It first struck me when I arrived at the airport, but didn't really surface with clarity until a few days before I left.

When my cousins came up to hug me, we were all squealing and one of them goes, "Here, get a picture of me and Abby!" She wrapped her arms around my neck in this overly affectionate way and smiled into the camera.

Throughout the next few days, we all took pictures hugging each other, holding hands and jumping, even giving each other silly kisses on the cheek. And it hit me, We don't actually do this in real life. We're affectionate, but not this affectionate. 

But it wasn't until I read the caption of a photo I'd posted on Instagram where I said that I loved my cousin that I realized I hadn't actually told her I loved her to her face. Why was that?

And then it was like a scene from a movie where a horde of mental images came flashing back. I remembered tons of Instagram photos of friends at graduation and other things, all with epic-novel-length captions about how much their friendship had meant to them. At the time, I'd smiled and thought it was sweet, as everyone does. But all of a sudden, I had a thought.

If someone means that much to you, why don't you tell them instead of putting it in a caption?

It was this earth-shaking epiphany where I realized that (as Tom so wisely said about greeting cards in 500 Days of Summer) we can't truly say what we feel anymore. We rely on widely-used catchphrases. Greeting cards. Hashtags, for crying out loud. The whole time I'd been in California, I never once told my cousins, out loud, that I loved them, until we were about to say goodbye.

Don't get me wrong, it is really sweet when someone takes the time to write a long blurb about how much they love their friend underneath a photo. But if the most I ever directly say how much someone mean to me is in typed words, I feel like I'll have missed something.

We can't say what we feel any more. We hide behind screens and texts and masks of sarcasm because we're afraid to just be real to someone's face.

Be brave, world.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: I guess this is a little...judgemental(?) of society for a blog post. But hey, the fact that you came to read this means you actually care what I think. So there you go.