Word Matters

For the vast majority of my life, words have been my refuge.

When the seas get stormy, I will write. I create. I use words to communicate joy, fear, apprehension, humor, and life in general. I have written papers, essays — and while I’ve never authored a book, I have written fairly regularly in blog form for about 15 years. Doesn’t make me an expert, but it does afford me insight into the power of words.

I’m also a grammarian, serving as house editor during my stay at Initech. While I often break the rules in my own writing, I know the power of a properly placed comma. I am a fan of the controversial Oxford Comma for one reason only: it boosts understanding of a phrase. And yes, I’ve had some knock-down drag-out nerd arguments with people on something as seemingly trite as the Oxford Comma. I always win.

Communication is important. Grammar lends subtle meaning — hints at what we’re really thinking. It reveals truth in times of uncertainty. Take, for example, a brief scene out of the show, “Hamilton” where Alexander Hamilton’s sister-in-law muses over his letter wherein Alexander writes, “My dear, Angelica” — prompting her to opine about the placement of that comma. What did it really mean? Because Hamilton was known to be a prolific writer, surely he knew that the placement (or absence) of that one little piece of ink could change the entire meaning of the phrase.

To me, words are equally important. When I was 17 and mentioned that I wanted to buy a dress so I could attend prom, my father said (and I quote exactly): “Who would ask you anyway?” I took it as an insult. You could twist his meaning and wonder if he meant to inquire as to whether or not I’d been asked, but I assure you, that wasn’t it. His inflection and emphasis was on the “you” — as in, “Who would ask YOU anyway.” A direct hit.

That phrase has stuck with me so much that in all these years since, I hear it in my head as much as I heard it loud and clear that day. The message was derogatory. The insult landed squarely on target. I never brought up the dress again. I never went to prom. He was right, though. No one ever did ask me.

They were right about so many things in their cruel way. If I mentioned a boy I liked, I quickly learned to not mention it at all once I heard them say, “He’s not interested in someone like you. If he is, he’s only wanting one thing.” And that one thing was never me as a human being, as a mind, as a person. And they weren’t wrong. That particular boy tried to rape me not long after that. I remember him capturing me, the struggle, his breath on my neck. I remember him saying, “Calm down.” I escaped (barely) and never told my parents or anyone except my best friend Sue. A couple days later was the first time I tried to kill myself.

Words matter.

I remember that a few months later, I was in junior high school. Public school for the first time (after being in Catholic school). I had a crush on a boy and would find myself staring at him from several lunch tables away. One of his friends spotted me and sent their girlfriend over. She quite loudly told me to stop staring at him. “Who do you think you are?” she pronounced. She told the whole lunch room (which went dead silent at that moment) that someone like him would never EVER like someone like me. I looked ridiculous. I was fat (I wasn’t fat). I was ugly (I wasn’t ugly). I dressed badly (probably true). I was unworthy (debatable). And that he wants me to stop looking at him because I’m embarrassing him. Should I ever be caught looking at him again, she’d be back and would be beat me up.

It was a hard habit to break, but I stopped staring at him. I started going outside to the bleachers to have lunch. I then stopped eating altogether. No one noticed.

Words have consequences.

You know, it’s been about 40 years since that happened, and yet I still feel the heat in my cheeks as if it happened yesterday. Truly.

Fast forward a few years to college when I somehow screwed up the courage to ask my mother to approve birth control for me (I was 18 and under my parents’ insurance). For the first time in my life I had a boyfriend and I wanted to be responsible. She was shocked. Appalled. Angry. She cried and called me “whore” and “slut” and told me how ashamed she was to be my mother. I wondered how she didn’t realize how ashamed I was of HER? I ended up paying for the birth control out of pocket, but it didn’t matter anyway. The guy I was seeing found someone else. I started binging and vomiting.

Words have power.

All the times my mother shamed me. My sister shamed me. My father shamed me. All for no justifiable reason that I know of. Some might say it was to protect me. Others might say it was to give me a realistic outlook on life. And still others would consider it simply a cruel game of control.

But those are the collective voices I hear in my head whenever I think someone might like me. Slut. Whore. Unworthy. Never. Ridiculous. Calm down. Who do you think you are?

This is how I find myself in the situation I’m in and how I have such a hard time dealing with romantic entanglements now.

Bob was drunk again last night. He’s starting a new job and — in an alcoholic’s incredible wisdom — decided to get plastered the night before he was supposed to start. I’m guessing he has no intention of showing up on his first day of work. He called me last night and, during a conversation I’d rather not relay right now, he told me he loved me. Spontaneously. Genuinely. Gently. “I love you.”

The words violated me. They sent a flood of hormones coursing through my body against my will. I know it’s not true. Yet…dammit, I want it to be. But no. No. I SAID NO!

He’s an asshole. He’s a loser. He’s a a liar and a no-good alcoholic. He chose her, not me. Logic. Truth.

So understand, dear reader, that between truth, logic, and emotion, which the adult me can parse through, there remains that emotionally stunted teenager who just wanted someone (anyone) to love her. It’s a complicating factor that makes the analysis of the situation at best cloudy, and at worst, dangerous. Once again, I’m sitting in the middle of the lunchroom hearing the taunts of a classmate telling me I’m a shitball. I hear my mother calling me a whore. I hear the rapist telling me to calm down. I hear my father pronouncing that no one would ever love me anyway. I hear that I’m being ridiculous. I hear: I am not allowed to ever feel safe or happy.

Words have significance.

It changes the conversation. Once lovers, now for a couple years we are nothing but friends, then one night he gets drunk at his other friends’ house and all of a sudden he loves me? And what does love even mean to an alcoholic? My mother was an alcoholic. So when she called me a slut and a whore (both, blatantly untrue) does the fact that she was intoxicated negate them into falsehood or materialize them into fact? Neither. They were just words expressing her anger at the world. Her disappointment that I was not perfect; I was flawed. That she had failed to protect me from all the things she perceived as disappointing in life. She saw me through the reflection of her own experience. I wasn’t the slut or whore; in fact, she was. She got pregnant out of wedlock. She’d had sex before marriage. She was the slut — and I represented that. I was all the disappointment she felt for herself.

So she let me have it for all the things she couldn’t say.

Perhaps that’s what Bob was saying. I love you, not directed at me, but directed at what he wishes he could hear from those he cares about. Wishing he could hear it from Tracy, the re-girlfriend. Wishing his mother loved him better. Wishing he was valued in the circle of people he cares for. Instead he utters it through a drunken slur at me, an easy target, several miles away.

I don’t know.

All I am sure of is that I’m writing this article with a knot in my stomach wishing he had never said it. Wishing I’d never met him. Oh! How much simpler life would be!

But still I rise to face the sea.

Still I get up and do it all again the next day. I may not be the most beautiful, I may not be the most perfect, but I am — unquestioningly — resilient. I want to believe that someday someone will say “I love you,” and I will allow myself to feel it and believe. I won’t question its meaning or the intentions of the person who utters the phrase. Someday, just maybe, I will look back on all this and laugh at how silly I was. To devote an hour of my life to writing a silly essay on the meaning of words when I knew all along they meant nothing. Bob will be a distant memory, much as so many others are, and I will brush my brow at the thought and say “I really dodged a bullet there, didn’t I?”

And those words will count too!

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“Feeling sorry for yourself, and your present condition, is not only a waste of energy but the worst habit you could possibly have.” – Dale Carnegie