The Conversation You Owe by Years

A postponed conversation does not stand still: every year the silence itself is added to the subject. In ten years you will have two things to explain instead of one.

Name to yourself the single conversation you have postponed longest — you know which one, it surfaces on its own. Today do three things. First: write one sentence on paper, the thing the conversation is for; if the sentence will not be written, the conversation is not formulated yet, and that alone is work. Second: write or call that person and set a time today or within the next few days, with the words I want to talk about one thing, it matters. Third: hold the conversation and open with that exact sentence from the paper, not with the weather. Do not stretch it past an hour and do not try to settle everything in one go.

Almost always the conversation itself turns out shorter and calmer than the years of preparing for it, and afterwards what changes is not the other person but how much strength you were spending on silence. It may turn out they remember it differently or not at all; that is also an answer worth coming for. If you could not carry it through, count the second step: the time is set, the date is in the calendar — from that moment the conversation stopped being endless.