Sticks and Stones II

Despite Obama’s victory, in the past year, I have become quite pessimistic about the power of words to change the world. Although, if I honestly reflect on it, I really lost my faith in the power of words in a roundabout way. I was betrayed by a boyfriend who I thought understood my art and a friend about whom I had a whole body of photography. As I lost faith in other people, I lost faith in words.

However, despite my loss of faith in words’ power, in the past month, I have had to admit the power of words to affect me. An older relative of mine gave me advice that I needed to get a “real job,” and in her soliloquy (because I do not think she really saw me as she was talking) she called me “spoiled” and “arrogant.” At that moment I listened, respecting her experience and wanting to appear respectful, but those words stuck with me and stung me throughout the day. They were like a sticky, burning poison on my skin. They kept on popping up in my memory throughout the day and making me want to shrivel and dry up and make a grape’s transition to a raisin. Most of her career and life advice was forgot. As those words, “spoiled” and “arrogant” hissed at me, I got incrementally angrier at my well-meaning “aunt.”

Several days later, a friend emailed me a love letter, ending with the statement that he “loved everything about me.” Even though I do not feel the same way, I would re-read the email, highlighting with my eyes that final sentence because it made me feel good. I do not feel like I could ever reveal my everything to him and thus I have a hard time feeling or even believing his love, the words themselves expressed their meaning: when I read them I could not help but smile. They lifted my spirit.
My rational thoughts that my aunt means well or that my friend does not really know me or love me did not change how the words themselves made me feel: “spoiled” and “arrogant” smarted like a smack in the bottom and “I love everything about you” made me feel warm like a cup of tea.

These experiences made me think that I was being a little silly to think that the well-chosen words in a pertinent context are just air or marks on a page. Words and language go much deeper in a human being. We know words through our experience and we make our experience known through words. It should not surprise me then that words can illicit such a strong emotional reaction. But somehow, I had come so far away from faith even in myself that I had forgotten one of the defining things about human existence: verbal communication.