So, the daily writing prompt I received today was one I had previously answered. I didn’t want to use it again, and since this seems to be happening more frequently, I instead went searching for a list of prompts that I could pull from when this happens.

I found a list that will provide a new prompt each day for a year, and they’re listed by date so I can follow them in relatively close order as needed. Todays is below.

Explain your biggest regret – as though to a child.

Before I dive into the “explaining to a child” part, I want to provide a little context.

Socially, I can be a fair bit awkward. Less so as I’ve gotten older, but still awkward. I attribute this to the way society has developed over the course of the last hundred years or so, and the way that people are conditioned to exhibit and understand social cues. This is particularly important when it comes to romantic attraction, as that’s what I want to explain today.

As much as this may be therapeutic for me, I don’t want to mistake writing this out as a perfect alternative to actually speaking to a therapist (which I don’t have one but maybe should get one).

Explaining this might be hard but I’m going to give it a shot anyways, so enough stalling. On to the explanation.

You know when you meet someone, and become friends? Sometimes you eventually end up liking them a whole lot, but you’re afraid to tell them?

Why would you be afraid to tell them?

Well, you might be afraid that they’re not going to feel the same way back, and that maybe they’ll stop talking to you.

Why would they stop talking to you?

Maybe because they start thinking you aren’t who they thought you were? That what you really wanted all along is something different than they thought you wanted? And they don’t want things to change. They like exactly what you have right now, but they think that’s gone.

Why does that matter?

Because my biggest regret is never taking the chance to be honest about how I feel, about how much I really did like them and they stopped talking to me eventually anyway.

But why did they stop talking to you anyway?

That part is a bit harder to explain. Maybe I didn’t give them a reason to still talk to me as much and they started talking to other people more. They might have gone somewhere else that I chose not to go to, or that I couldn’t go.

Well, if they stopped talking to you anyway, then do you think it would have mattered anyway if you had told them you liked them?

It would definitely matter. Why? Because never taking that chance to open up meant never learning how to properly express how I feel about those people that I really like.

What do you mean?

Everybody is going to live different lives, see and do different things, and that means they’re going to experience different things. Including how they want to talk to other people, or how they want other people to talk to them.

I don’t think I get it.

That’s alright, it’s something you’ll learn if you keep talking to people and listening to them. And I really do mean it, listen to them and try to understand what matters to them. Don’t be afraid to tell people how you feel so that you can learn how they feel in return. Don’t be afraid of that chance that they might stop talking to you just because you don’t want them to.

Not sure if I explained that well enough for a child to understand, but I think I did my best.

I don’t resent myself or the other people in the few times I have opened up and been shot down, but in retrospect I do see things I could have either done better or acknowledged that I might have been seeing things through rose tinted glasses, which all added up to me opening up less often/take fewer chances to meet people I might have been romantically attracted to.