The following quote from Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami has hung with me for a few days now:
Reiko smiled too, cigarette in mouth. “You are a good person, though. I can tell that much from looking at you. I can tell these things after seven years of watching people come and go here: there are people who can open their hearts and people who can’t. You’re one of the ones who can. Or, more precisely, you can if you want to.”
“What happens when people open their hearts?”
Cigarette dangling from her lips, Reiko clasped her hands together on the table. She was enjoying this. “They get better,” she said. Her ashes dropped onto the table, but she paid them no mind.
Having an open heart can be humiliating and humbling. It is much easier to sequester away what I most need to express — those feelings and emotions that hang on the tip of my tongue for what seems like hours. There are numerous times when I have sat face to face with someone with an entire well of words that I wanted to say, but I just couldn’t bring myself to speak. My mouth wasn’t dry. My brain was functioning. But there was something — maybe sanity or dignity or something that I will only be able to grasp much later in life — that holds me back.