Girl, You Deserve Answers, You Are Worth An Answer

We are raised and brought up on answering questions; responding to someone is just something that we have all been taught to do.

We are told to raise our hands, to respond with “yes” or “no.”

We are told ignorance is rude- the list goes on.

We are told but we don’t tell.

The idea of answering to others is a common task that we’ve had much experience with. But somehow, somewhere along the way, we’ve forgotten how to answer and respond to the feelings of others. Ironically, we can no longer answer questions with “yes” or “no”, they’ve become much more complicated than that-the cons of growing up.

Sometimes we don’t even get an answer, let alone the one we had hoped to hear. It’s strange, don’t you think, the older we’re getting the less we’re able to tell people what we really want?

It was much easier at recess to tell Sally you didn’t like her or “Yes, Billy, I think you’re adorable and would love to split my peanut butter and jelly sandwich with you!” But now, it seems that it’s harder to express what we want to tell the other person. One result can either be getting “ghosted”, or the numerous text you’ve continued to send no longer reach them because they’ve blocked your number.

Or you continuously search for an answer, because you think in the end it’ll change things, but it won’t. You just want it to.

We convince ourselves that in order to move on we need the validation. That’s where we are wrong. Even when we deserve answers, we don’t receive them. It’s a vicious cycle; we tend to form our own answers from this, ones we either want to believe, or ones that hurt us even more.

An old “pal” of mine once told me there aren’t answers for everything. Deep down, I already knew the answer to the burning question I was constantly asking myself, but I thought I needed to hear it from him to believe it. Long story short, I never got the answer I wanted to hear. I never really got the answer, because there was none. I learned through several months of ignorance that I would never be satisfied with the problem at hand.

Sure, we have a hard time hearing the truth, especially the truth we never expected to hear. But, I think it’s harder not hearing anything at all. Silence can say a multitude of responses; you never know which it is- that hurts much more. We deserve answers, we deserve closure from situations that have changed us.

We deserve to know the truth. We deserve a lot, but we aren’t guaranteed any of it.

There is no lesson that we learn in school to grant people closure. I just always expected that one day there would be answers, but as I am getting older, I am learning that there isn’t one for everything. I wake up and I wonder if I had said or done something differently- would things be different now? But I can’t live my life questioning what it is that I have done. I began to move. I moved from this state of constant question because I knew answers didn’t exist in these types of situations. Life gets complicated the older you get. Things aren’t as simple as they once were. No one knows everything, and some of us barely know anything at all.

We’re not guaranteed tomorrow, so if you love someone- I think you should say “I love you.” And if you don’t love someone, tell them. Either way you put it, it’s going to sting, horribly. But you’re act of courage will be appreciated one day by them. Maybe not right away, but down the road it’ll make them stronger, it’ll make them grow.

It’s stupid to waste our time waiting for people to decide, to act, to fucking speak and say something. It’s time we stop waiting for others, and do things for ourselves. It’s stupid to tell one person one thing, and act the opposite upon it. It’s wrong to steer people in one direction when you’re in another. I don’t know why we do it; I don’t know how we change it.

What I can tell you all is I’ve learned more than I should have from silence. There are so many answers I’ve never been given, and I don’t know if I’ll ever get them. I’ve come to terms with that, and it bothers me; I won’t lie. But it’s better than living life in denial. I wish I could know everything, but I’m not meant to. If there is anything I’ve learned, it’s to be honest.

Be honest with yourself and be honest with others about your feelings. It’s okay to validate them. If you don’t have any feelings, that too is fine, but I think you owe it to the other person to tell them that.

I guess it depends on your moral, if you “owe” people anything. I think you owe it to yourself, to be the best version possible. I want to know at the end of the day, I have said everything I have needed to say. Don’t wait until tomorrow to tell that person in your life what you need to. We never know what is to come or what can happen.

I’ve spent a lot of time searching for answers that ultimately only lead to dead ends. Everything in this world is a mystery, and maybe it’s meant to. But I guess we’ll never know… right?