I was reading Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal late at night when the house had gone quiet, one of those books you put down midway not because it lost you but because it found you too precisely, and I came across a question a doctor had started asking his dying patients. What does a good day look like to you? What are you afraid of losing? Simple questions. Almost embarrassingly simple. And yet most people had never been asked them. They had the answers ready. They’d just been waiting, maybe for years, for someone to finally create the space.
I closed the book. I didn’t pick it back up for a while.
I just sat there thinking about everyone I love and how rarely I ask them anything close to that. Not because I don’t care. Because I always assume there’s more time. Because asking it on an ordinary evening, without a reason, without a crisis forcing my hand, feels like too much. Like I’d be introducing a weight the moment didn’t call for.
But that’s the thing I keep coming back to. We’re always waiting for the moment to call for it.
And it never does. Life doesn’t clear its throat and announce that now is the time to say the true thing. It just keeps moving, and we keep moving with it, and the true things stay inside us, fully formed, waiting for a door that opens on its own. It mostly doesn’t.
I think about how many conversations I’ve had with people I genuinely love where I said the approximate thing instead of the actual thing. Where I came close, circled it, and then pulled back at the last second because saying it out loud felt like too much exposure. Like handing someone something fragile and watching them decide whether to hold it carefully or set it down. That possibility, of someone setting it down, is enough to keep most of us quiet for years.
So we speak in the language of almost. We imply. We suggest. We say “you know I’m here” instead of “I’m scared of losing you.” We say “it’s fine” instead of “this is hurting me more than I’ve let on.” We perform okayness so consistently that we forget we’re performing it, and then one day we’re surprised to feel so unseen by the very people who are closest to us.
But they’re not not seeing us. They’re seeing exactly what we showed them.
I’ve done this my whole life in different ways. Held things in because letting them out felt risky, or inconvenient, or like too much to ask someone to carry. I’ve watched relationships quietly thin out not because anyone stopped caring but because nobody said the thing that would have kept them thick. You don’t always know that’s what’s happening while it’s happening. You think you’re being considerate. You think you’re protecting the other person. Sometimes you’re just afraid.
And I understand the fear. I really do. Because saying the real thing makes it real. As long as it stays inside you it’s still yours, still safe, still something you can revise. Once you say it, it lives in the space between two people and you have no control over what happens to it next.
But here’s what I’ve started to understand, slowly and reluctantly the way you understand most important things. The not-saying has a cost too. It’s just a quieter one. It doesn’t arrive all at once. It accumulates, the way dust does, in the corners of things, until one day the light hits a certain way and you see how much has gathered without you noticing.
People leave this life, and sometimes they leave it without ever knowing what they genuinely meant to someone. Not because nobody felt it. Because nobody said it while there was still the ordinary ease of time to say it in. While it could have been said over breakfast, or in a car, or standing in a kitchen doing nothing in particular. Those are the moments. Not the grand ones. The unremarkable ones that are only precious in hindsight.
I don’t want to keep learning things only in hindsight.
I’m trying, genuinely trying, to be someone who says it while it’s still early enough to matter in the everyday way. Not the dramatic, last-chance way. The quiet, Tuesday-afternoon way. Where saying “you mean a lot to me” isn’t a goodbye, it’s just the truth, offered plainly, because the person in front of you deserves to know it while they’re right there in front of you.
I’m not good at this yet. I still swallow things. I still choose comfort over honesty more than I should. I still sometimes talk around the real thing and hope the other person is fluent enough in me to find it on their own.
But I’m more aware of it now than I was. And I think awareness, even when it’s uncomfortable, is the beginning of something.
The dying patients in that book, when finally asked what mattered, knew immediately. No hesitation. They’d always known. They just hadn’t been asked.
I don’t want to wait to be asked.
By the way, did you know that I’m actively writing in malayalam also these days. Find them here. I’ve written a small book as well if you’re into that. If you like listening to stuff, do scroll through the selection of podcasts. If you’ve time, have a look at the visuals I’ve made. Grateful for your moment here. Keep coming back here : )