Words, Just Words

There’s something provocatively intimate about exposing your hopes, thoughts, and darkest confessions. Spelled out in seemingly harmless black and white, words become more than just letters arranged in a systematic phonetic order. There, in cohesive and unifying fragments, words are given the voice that speaks their truth into existence. Those words then have the power to encourage, to heal, to entertain, to educate, to control, to hurt. Words, innocent as they may appear, are quite the contrary. I should know. I’m a survivor of words.

The danger in words is their ability to inflict significant pain and severe injuries that remain undetected to the human eye. They can be utilized as shackles to manipulate and control or as weapons to penetrate even the strongest armor of self confidence. Words can mutilate the truth and allow paranoia and fear to infiltrate the surface of reality. The greatest danger lies in the ability of words to torture and drub a soul to death. When given a voice, the jagged, whetted edges cut through layers of sinew, flesh, and bone as life bleeds out from the wound. I have been reduced to a trembling, injured mess, pathetically begging for the mercy of my attacker. I nursed my own wounds, cleaned away all evidence of the assault, and basked in the temporary calm that succeeds such a storm.

It wasn’t until I harnessed those words into the confines of text that I began to gain an air of control. Organized into sentences and paragraphs and held tightly within the boundaries of a page, the words were no longer able to escape into the shadows of my mind. Here, in black and white, the words lost their colorful rage and grew weaker. The fuel my anxiety and fear supplied was no longer accessible, and the words lost their power. Like a tattoo on my body, I get to interpret their meaning and importance as it relates to me. So now, unashamedly, I gather these words naked before you. The voiceless becomes the writer, and my words become the truth. The story they tell is one of hope, trial, suffering, and survival. No longer concealed, these are the most intimate details of my life. The impact they have on you is yours to decide. Otherwise, they are words, just words.