I once overheard my dad enthralling a room full of people with a story featuring a curvy woman, one especially blessed in the mammary gland department. At the last minute, he caught me in his peripheral vision and inexplicably decided “bosomy” was the child-friendliest adjective he could choose. At age 8, this was like winning the hilarity lottery. I got huge laughs when I immediately relayed the story to my friends and an early glimpse into the power of a perfectly chosen word to transform an anecdote into an audience-leveling glitter bomb.
Years later, in an attempt to glean life lessons from the vent-riddled, spit-upon pages of my writing book, I read page after page of judgment, self-recrimination, and rants that I wrote as a purge, surely believing that I was wringing these feelings out of my soul washcloth. But my subconscious has no sense of humor and couldn't tell I was totally being sarcastic. To my subconscious, every terrible, loathsome thing I said about myself was the truth, and so I continued to make choices that kept me painted into the same dysfunctional corner. I was never nurturing, never wrote about being worthy or deserving, never spoke of pride or success. According to my book, I was a blocked, frustrated writer, eloquent only when I wanted to complain about another lame boyfriend or fret over a stressful job I never gave myself credit for landing in the first place.
I was familiar with the weight of words and the wide pendulum swing of reactions they could elicit. When I discovered the sloppier, less rehearsed language adults used alone in conversation I felt like I had stumbled onto a secret dialect distinct from the one aimed downward at children. Using big words made me feel casually grown-up and special, even though half the time I would be met with an eye roll and crossed-armed huff that would be as emotionally devastating today as it was in the third grade. No one likes a vocabulary show-off. I knew the words had power, I knew they could seduce and inflate, color and crush, why did I think I would be immune to these sharply pointed insults just because I had written them myself?
How do you describe yourself in your writing? For every verbal kick you give yourself in frustration you can choose words to recalibrate your confidence. Every insult you hurl has a caring flip side to soothe hurt feelings. Every complaint has a solution but not in a novella about a sad-sack unworthy of happiness. Vent, unleash, unload, but take the opportunity to end your writing by coming back to your powerful center, your loving core, and your certainty that crappy moments are not the only moments. Your words are speaking to your subconscious, which reality do you want it to embrace?
