words
Updated: Feb 7, 2021
Words brought me through (got me through?) 2020.
Words that I read, I spoke, I heard & I wrote.
They calmed me, educated me, grounded me & let me escape.
They inspired me, disappointed me, challenged me & pushed me to do better.
Sometimes words are too much and sometimes they're not enough. I mean, isn't it ironic that I'm using words to juxtapose their own power and inability? Isn't it interesting that a powerful speech is marked by its moments of silence? When words find their rhythm as they dance with silence, they become exactly what we need.
My favorite thing about words is their ability to make the ordinary feel special, like the way an author can make sipping a cup of tea feel intimate or evoke emotion from an inanimate object. Words have the power to make endless months within the same walls feel profound and they allow us to escape when it becomes too much. Words are an outlet for honoring inexplicable grief and they can evoke nostalgia as strong as a forgotten smell or taste. Words open windows into new experiences and they teach us about our surroundings. They can expose deep chasms and trigger anger and fear. All of these things are terribly ordinary and yet when put into words they become tangible, something we can wrap our minds around, something we can quote.
I spent more hours reading in 2020 than probably several recent years combined and regardless of their context, the words were always what I needed. To me, it was like how they describe riding a bike - like returning to something that is second nature. I read fiction stories and autobiographies. I read history books and articles on everything from the biology of COVID-19 to the Black Lives Matter movement and campaign updates. I read Instagram posts and emails and text messages endlessly. I consumed other people's words like my life depended on it. But what surprised me was the way that I used my own words.
The only thing I've ever really written are academic papers. For 21 years I was trained to write well-organized, fully researched essays for the professor's evaluation. Of course, people (especially church people) tried to tell me that journaling would help me keep track of my emotions. Being a perfectionist, I thought that meant recounting my daily activities "Dear Diary"-style, in great detail - on repeat - until I died. Being a perfectionist, I gave up when I didn't make it past a week of thoroughly informing my notebook of who I had talked to and what I had eaten for dinner.
In my second year of college, years after giving up on diaries, I started making bullet-pointed lists of all the things that didn't make sense. I finally gave myself permission to write only what I wanted to write, when I wanted to write it. It was always jumbled, raw emotion stuck on a page just so it didn't have to live in my head and it became a survival mechanism. Seven years later, I have notebooks full of messy, emotional thoughts that I keep hidden away. Riverbeds full with streams of consciousness; the words that found me when I was at a loss for words.
Words don't come when I force them, words come when I need them. They come when I let my mind wander and my pen describe what my logic cannot, becoming poetry when I least expect a performance.
Sometimes words are too much and sometimes they're not enough, but in 2020 they were just right. Last year my pen was poetry personified in the way it let me cry, it tended my homesickness and articulated my rage in ways it never has before. Last year made sure that all the next years will be filled with (my) words when they need to be said and silence when they need to be heard. Words, that will find their rhythm in the very nature of their expression.
Books I read in 2020:
Living to Tell the Tale | Gabriel García Márquez
Still Being Punished | Rachel Selby
India Calling | Anand Giridharadas
A Man Called Ove | Fredrik Backman
Becoming | Michelle Obama
The Newcomers | Helen Thorpe
Ghetto | Mitchell Dunier
Little Fires Everywhere | Celeste Ng
Stamped from the Beginning | Ibram X. Kendi
Naturally Tan | Tan France
Worth It | Brit Barron
Home Body | Rupi Kaur
Where the Crawdads Sing | Delia Owens
There There | Tommy Orange
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