"Is it better to speak or to die?"

[ okay, hello. Call Me by Your Name is one of my favorite movies of all time and I keep seeing this quote everywhere lately so I wrote a whole Journal entry about it the other day and figured I might as well copy it here because.... why not. so here it is. ]

"Is it better to speak or to die?"
I genuinely don't know. This is such an incredible sentiment to have only been so briefly mentioned [in the movie]. I'm glad people seem to have stuck to it anyways.
To Speak, you risk everything. The loss of what you already/currently have, and more than anything, the risk of rejection -- in any form. The risk of speaking and therefore knowing being worse. The risk of the truth being worse than the not-knowing. But then, to die -- the hell of not knowing and still always wondering; of choosing, consciously, not to speak, knowing that it will kill you, knowing that the other option is To Die -- but despite everything, being so terribly afraid of that possibility -- of the truth being worse -- that you can't bring yourself to act.
Neither option is necessarily the "better" one. Both have their flaws. Clearly. Maybe the trick is that whichever one you don't choose will always seem like the better choice. To me, To Speak seems like the better choice. The not-knowing, the endless cycles of What-Ifs -- they'll ruin me, and I know that. So, To Speak will always seem better, to me. But that's only because I know that I will always Die. Always more afraid of speaking going wrong in one way or another. That somehow It Could Still Get Worse. 
And I think there's even more to it than that. To Speak requires action. It requires a very conscious decision to do something different. Or to do anything at all. Sometimes change (in any form) is the hardest part. To Speak, you have to choose that change, to make things different yourself. Maybe, sometimes, To Die is the better option (or at least the one chosen) because all it requires is continued complacency. All you have to do is to continue doing nothing. Will you suffer for it? Probably. But by now you've been suffering with it. At least this form of suffering is familiar, comforting almost, in that it is known, at the very least. There is potential suffering as well in choosing To Speak, but the unknown is almost always more terrifying than the pain you already know.