I believe every person carries unspoken thoughts about someone in their life. Things we feel deeply but never express. Not because we don’t care, but because we’re afraid.
Afraid of rejection. Afraid of looking foolish. Afraid of changing the dynamic. Afraid of hearing an answer we can’t undo. So instead, we stay silent. We convince ourselves it doesn’t matter. We pre-write the ending in our own head and never even take the shot.
“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take” is cliché for a reason, it’s true. But I think it goes deeper than that. We don’t just avoid rejection. We avoid possibility.
Because possibility requires vulnerability, and vulnerability means we no longer get to hide behind what if. Here’s the subtle lie we tell ourselves:
“I already know the answer.”
But the truth is, we don’t actually know the answer. We just know the risk. So our mind replaces uncertainty with certainty. It turns fear into logic. It turns possibility into a conclusion that feels safer than reality.
There are people in our lives right now. people we’re attracted to, curious about, drawn to, that we will never say anything to. Not because we don’t feel it, but because we’ve already decided how the story ends without ever letting it begin.
And the irony is this: Rejection hurts for a while. Regret lasts much longer.
Rejection says, “This person didn’t choose me.”
Regret says, “I never gave reality a chance to choose at all.”
One is about another person. The other is about our own agency.
Here’s the hard part to admit: Most of the regret we carry in life doesn’t come from what we did.
It comes from what we never said. The feelings we swallowed. The risks we avoided.
The words we rehearsed a thousand times but never spoke out loud.
Maybe if I had told someone how I felt sooner, things would have been different. Maybe not.
But the truth is, I’ll never know. And that’s the part that stays with you.
We tell ourselves silence is safer. But silence guarantees one outcome: nothing changes.
No new connection. No new opportunity. No new story.
Just the same ending we already predicted. And maybe the real risk isn’t rejection at all. Maybe the real risk is living a life full of almosts, what-ifs, and unsent sentences. Because in the end, the things we never say don’t disappear. They just turn into regrets we carry quietly.
Troy P Zehnder 