I don’t often write to you directly. I’m talented at skirting around the need by telling my own personal stories or making observations of the general “we” of humanity, but never to you specifically. The truth is, I’m afraid of you; your specificity, your personal judgements, your singular history, your particular opinions. When I write to “you all,” I rather confidently speak to how I see the human condition as a whole. It’s vast and inclusive…and safe. But you are a unique being. Your individual opinion matters, yet I don’t have patience nor desire to deal with your uniqueness independent of the whole. I love the whole because nothing gets left out. When I write to you directly, I’m forced to narrow the whole to a fraction of what a human is capable of. When I write to you directly, I have to take aspects of you more seriously than I care to and I have to be willing to hold parts of you closer to my heart than I wish. When I write to you directly, it puts us on the same playing field; a field that I’m afraid will miss me entirely, or trample me with its speed and intensity that I fear I can never match. When I write to you directly, I can’t seem to help but tell you what to do instead of giving you the space to figure it out for yourself. I admit, I often don’t have the confidence that you will. I realize that I won’t ever reach you if I don’t come down off the pedestal from which I climbed up myself. Yet, I avoid the need altogether so I don’t have to face my own misgivings — my imperfection, my missing the mark, my laziness, my judgement, my ignorance. It seems my fear of you is more accurately my fear of me.