The other night, my roommate showed me a letter she wrote to someone she cared about but knew she wouldn’t see again. She called it a closure letter — a piece of paper with no intention of being sent, but holding all the words never said. 

I asked her, “What’s holding you back from saying this face-to-face?” She replied that she was scared of how they might react and handed me a blank card to write my own letter to someone I know that, come May, I’ll never see again. As I took the card, presented with the ostensible opportunity to wipe the slate clean, I realized I was guilty of harboring the same fear.

“To speak our life as we feel it is a freedom we mostly choose not to take,” wrote South African novelist Deborah Levy in her autobiography “The Cost of Living.” “But it seemed to me that the words she wanted to say were lively inside her, mysterious to herself as much as anyone else.”

College is supposed to be a time when you’re free to invent yourself, realize that isn’t who you are, and continue trying new things, people and experiences until you figure out who you want to become. But all that liberty attached to a college decision letter ends up decaying inside of us, unexplored.

It seems as if we’ve all silently yet collectively agreed to embody the infamous “cool girl” monologue, regardless of whether you’ve watched “Gone Girl” (2014) or have a copy of the book sitting on your desk. The “cool girl” is easy-going. She always understands and refrains from speaking her mind if it would cause disruption or inconvenience to another person.

But as a feigned “cool girl” herself, Amy Dunne, the protagonist, notes, “They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be.” While Dunne frames performance as a gendered idea, the impulse to morph into digestible versions of ourselves for others’ approval is universal. 

As college students, our lives have so many moving parts, from classes and internships to time spent dreading the future; we rarely have time to sit and ascertain what it is we really want for ourselves.

But busyness has a way of masquerading as self-knowledge — and the facade holds up until someone actually probes. I recently had a long conversation with a new friend who asked me questions about religion, fears and my future. While I appreciated that he wondered those things, I couldn’t help feeling slightly uncomfortable, like I didn’t know how to answer him because it had never occurred to me to figure myself out enough before.

In my head, I’m the bravest person I know. I fearlessly chase after what I want, act on how I feel and practice speeches of what I swear I’ll say to someone the next chance I get, knowing it’s a promise I routinely break. So instead, I turn to music to string together all the words I tend to swallow.

When War Child Records released their new benefit album “HELP(2)” in March, I listened to the Fontaines D.C. cover of “Black Boys on Mopeds.” The song is originally sung by Sinéad O’Connor, an outspoken Irish musician whose career was defined by her unapologetic, provocative honesty, which was met with harsh backlash. While listening, a lyric struck me harder than any lyric has in a long time: “To say what you feel is to dig your own grave.” 

Though this lyric captures how it feels to be vulnerable and lay everything bare, we dig our graves when we let the fear of sincerity and how others might react to it paralyze us from living our lives with authenticity.

Oftentimes, we stay in relationships long after our hearts have moved on, push aside feelings, deluding ourselves into believing it’s easier that way, and fall in and out of love with people who don’t truly see us without taking a good, long look inward.

If you keep living your life like it’s a movie, casting yourself in a cultivated embodiment of detachment, one day you’ll realize that the only person watching that movie is you. By then, you’ll be lucky if you even recognize yourself when you’re not playing a part.

Being confident in who you are is difficult work; it takes risks, time and guts. But it’s even scarier to float through life as a stranger to yourself.

I guess that’s why I write — to peer inside myself and mine to the core, no matter how tough or intimidating it might be. When my pen hits my beloved The New Yorker journal or my fingers glide across the keys of my MacBook, I discover what I believe, how I feel and what I have to say, giving me the words and confidence to speak them out loud.

Sometimes, I look back and wonder what it would be like if I said everything I truly wanted to, how differently things might’ve played out. But those doors have closed, and the best any of us can do now is live more authentically, telling people how we feel when we feel it.

The cost of living is pride — it’s releasing the fear of failure, judgment and change and showing our hand. But it’s a small price to pay to live your life like you own it.