By RILEY VUOLA
Staff Writer
I believe that the most important quality that a person can have is the ability to openly communicate with the people that they surround themselves with. Personally, I have been in and out of many different friend groups, and the ones that always work out for the longest are the ones where we are always talking to each other about what is bothering us or what another person in the group did that made someone uncomfortable. From there, we are able to resolve the problem since we actually know what it is in the first place. When people don’t tell their friends why they are upset or uncomfortable, how do they expect the problem to get resolved if we don’t even know there’s a problem to begin with?
A few weeks ago, I was hanging out with my friends during our school lunch. Everything seemed to be going completely fine and it was just like any other day. Suddenly my friend pulls me aside and says “I need to talk to you about what someone else in the group said you were doing that upset them.” Instant red flags. Why would they send someone else to talk to me? I went with my friend and they told me that I was making my other friend uncomfortable when I hugged them, since they’re not very affectionate. That’s completely fine and I can understand that some people are uncomfortable with that, but the part that annoyed me was the fact that my friend sent someone else to tell me what was going on. I believe that it’s inappropriate to bring other people into your own problems with someone else. If you’re not able to talk to someone about what they did to upset you then you’re just going to get walked over in life, and no one wants that.
Another instance where I went through something similar to this was in middle school. I was dating someone and during this relationship we didn’t really talk to each other. We just sat together during lunch and that was that. In about a month we ended things because we wouldn’t talk to each other about anything important, just petty middle school things. That is the moment that I realized that if you are not able to open up to people and have real conversations with them, then what’s the point in even talking to them? From then on I always told people exactly what I felt and what they did to hurt me, and things actually got way better. We were actually able to resolve these issues and move forward since we knew that there was a problem in the first place.
In conclusion, I believe that the most important quality in a person is the ability to communicate with the people they care about and the people that they surround themselves with. This is important to me because I have been around many people who did not have this quality and it always ended badly for the whole group. It’s good to tell someone when they upset you so that both of you can come up with a solution to the issue and move on. How do you solve a problem that you don’t know exists? If you never talk about it, then the issue has no chance of being resolved since no one knows it exists in the first place.