Confrontation

AHHHH!! Anxiety attack! One of the hardest things to do in life is to say hard things to people, especially people you love. Hard things include: telling someone you have feelings for them, telling someone you love them for the first time, telling someone you don't want to go out with them again.. or worse yet that you don't want to go out with them at all, breaking up with someone, asking someone for money they owe you when you know they don't have it or will be upset you asked, asking someone to borrow money, telling someone they aren't a good singer/photographer/dancer or whatever it is they think they're good at but that they really can't do (this particular one isn't done enough, as is evident in American Idol and other similar "I've got talent" shows), telling someone they're making a fool out of themselves (also something people don't do enough because they're afraid of hurt feelings, but wouldn't you rather know if you were the fool?), giving someone advice they don't want to hear, being the one to tell someone they lost a loved one, saying you're sorry, admitting to doing something hurtful or stupid, talking about relationships of any kind (especially the romantic kinds) with the other person in the relationship, asking someone if they want to marry you (and I don't mean proposing, I mean actually bringing the subject up for the first time), and oh so many more.

Life is full of necessary confrontations that most of us avoid like the plague. It's understandable why we avoid them. We could get rejected, which would either just be a devastating blow to the self-esteem or cause us to lose someone we love. We could also be rejecting someone else, which might hurt them and that's no fun. Mainly I think these are the two reasons why people avoid confrontation. We're afraid of hurt feelings or losing something important to us. These are both unpleasant things. However, I also believe that these things can be avoided more often than not if we simply go through with the confrontations we know we need to deal with. For instance, we might hurt our friend's feelings by telling them that they can't sing very well, but isn't that better than them auditioning on national television and becoming the laughing stock of a nation? Also, wouldn't you rather confront the person you love when something they're doing is hurting your feelings or bothering you or when you don't understand what they're thinking than just being perpetually confused and ending up breaking up because of frustration with each other? Also, wouldn't you rather take a chance on someone and get rejected than spend the rest of your life (or at least the next few months) wondering what could have happened?

Confrontation is like ripping off a Band-Aid. Keeping the Band-Aid on is comfortable, but that thing is getting pretty disgusting after all the showers you've taken with it on and you know you're going to have a wicked tan line if you leave it on any longer. So you rip it off. And it hurts.. but it can only get better from there.

I recently decided where I'm going to live next year. It was a process that consisted of a couple confrontations that needed to be made and I feel that if they weren't, things would have ended badly, but at least no one's feelings would be hurt, right? Well, I discovered that I don't mind being confronted most of the time and I'm glad when people get up the courage to talk to me about something. Also, I feel better when I talk to people that I need to talk to. Anyway, my situation ended well because we were willing to talk to each other, being honest and tactful and now we all feel good about our situations. So a word of advice, if you feel like you should talk to someone about something, just do it. You'll be glad you did.