This Is Why I Will Always Choose To Address The Elephant In The Room

Do you know how many times in my life I have ignored the elephant in the room and pretended it wasn’t there?

I can’t describe the tension that kept building up in the room every single time there was something that was so big between me and someone else that we needed to talk about, yet I just chose not to and pretended like there was nothing.

I hated confrontations so much, and I’ve avoided them for as long as I could remember. They were too difficult to handle and too intense most of the time. I kept being this way till I was in a relationship with someone who was exactly like me. He hated confrontations too. And honestly, having this flaw didn’t seem like such a big thing to me, but when you see it in your partner, it’s like someone is holding up a mirror in front of your face and showing you how much this tiny flaw of yours isn’t so little after all, but pretty catastrophic.

When we don’t address the elephant in the room and decide to neglect it, we leave room for assumptions and space for our imagination to keep on building our own conclusions that are not based on reality. We don’t communicate our feelings or thoughts regarding what’s going on, and we keep suppressing them inside of ourselves, which results in hurting our relationships more than we think. And the thing is, it just keeps getting worse and worse over time. It’s like having this unresolved thing that was initially little, but you let it grow and become bigger and bigger every day than what it really was.

If we addressed things as soon as they happen or even after a little while, it would’ve been better. Because when you decide to address it later, you’re not just dealing with the problem or what has happened, but you’re dealing with it plus all your assumptions, conclusions, fears, and feelings that you and the person in front of you have developed throughout the time you refuse to deal with it. It’s like turning one small thing that could’ve been easily resolved into this one big complex issue, all because you just wanted a temporary comfort from escaping the intensity of a confrontation and decided to trade it for long-term discomfort full of shying away from facing the actual problem.