I don’t like making statements on social media. I’ve never been one for solely performative actions. I don’t need my social, political, economical opinions validated or cemented in the eternity that exists in online spaces. I prefer to exist in the coffee shop conversations where opinions can change with the presentation of new information. Where differences of opinion are celebrated, not deleted, not cancelled. Questioned with open curiosity, with the possibility of others seeing something we don’t. Where context and back stories matter. I don’t hold my opinions so tightly that the criticism of them will break me. They do not need to be etched in stone. Statements and mottos can be up for interpretation and should be. But in such public spaces we seem to lack the ability to question why something my resonate so strongly within ourselves and others. We bite and snap and snarl at things that are different or challenge what we’ve always believed.

Even this idea is open to be challenged. Are there things we should hold in reverence regardless of the influx of new information? There are those that believe in infallible truth, of concepts unfit for discussion or evolution. Where growth can or should only occur within the confines of set parameters. Questions outside the range being blasphemous. We shy away from possibilities that we may be wrong, that there may be a different truth or no truth at all. 

But I think we lose something when we build walls around our beliefs and post guards at the gates. Certainty can be a comforting shelter, but it can also be a prison disguised as a fortress. When we refuse to step outside of it, we stop testing the strength of our own foundations. We forget that most of what we believe was once given to us by someone else — a teacher, a parent, a culture, a book, a moment in time that happened to stick.

And maybe that’s why I prefer conversations over declarations. Conversations can breathe. They can circle back, contradict themselves, stumble into a better question instead of rushing toward a tidy answer. They can be clumsy and human. They allow us to change our minds without having to pretend that the old mind never existed.

But somewhere along the way, we’ve mistaken firmness for virtue, as if a shifting opinion means a lack of integrity instead of proof of a living, thinking mind. We have forgotten that water carves stone not by shouting at it, but by moving — adjusting — flowing.

So no, I don’t need my thoughts immortalized in a feed. I need them to keep moving. I need them to keep meeting other thoughts in strange coffee shops and late-night kitchens and quiet walks home. I need them to be interruptible.

Because the day I stop letting them be interrupted is the day I’ve chosen the comfort of my own voice over the gift of someone else’s.