More Than Words
I’ve always had a very complicated relationship with words. They’ve been my lifeline, my sanity, a source of pain, a source of comfort. They’ve made me angry, they’ve made me sad, they’ve made me happy. A part of me has always been drawn to words, but I hadn’t really stopped to think why that might be. Throughout my entire life I have been reading everything I could possibly get my hands on, singing songs that made me feel things, and writing stories that will never see the light of day. I was always one of the more advanced readers in my classes, and I never had any trouble understanding grammar the way so many of my peers had. But up until college, I always thought of writing and me as two separate entities. It hadn’t occurred to me that reading could ever be more than a hobby, or that writing could ever serve as a creative outlet for me.
My love for words have influenced my music taste. I’m drawn to music with thought-provoking lyrics and talented vocalists who sing them back to me. I go to concerts frequently, and I believe the joy I find in doing so stems from that same love of words that made me attracted to those bands in the first place. There is something about watching bands who love what they do stand up on stage and deliver each word with passion and genuine emotion. Nothing in this world makes me feel more alive than I do when I’m standing in the middle of a crowd of sweaty people who are singing those words right back in the faces of the performers. In those moments, we are not a room full of strangers, we are one, bound together by the emotional connections we’ve made to those words being expressed.
I blame my love for words for my easily broken heart. I fall in love with words and ideas, not with the way I am treated. To me, words have always meant more than actions. I could brush my lips against someone else’s and have it mean nothing. Don’t get me wrong, there is beauty and meaning to be found in certain physical encounters. But as a female growing up in twenty-first century America, it has always been easier for me to let the physical mean nothing. I grew up watching television and hearing stories about hookups and sex with no strings. The first time was something sacred, but anytime after that carried no weight. To me, actions were easy. But words were hard. Words were special. Words were honest. It took me a long time to realize that for other people, this wasn’t necessarily true. Other people could string letters together carelessly. Other people could craft sentences effortlessly. Other people could share their words with me and have them mean nothing, the same way I had let my touch mean nothing on too many occasions. My naivety about different personalities made this the hardest lesson words ever taught me.
A boy I used to talk to during my senior year of high school always spoke of these elaborate fantasies involving us running away together to a foreign country. In these alternate futures he dreamt up, I was almost always spending my days reading on the beach. To me, it sounded perfect. At the time, I thought it was perfect because any scenario where I got to spend my life with him sounded perfect. Now the boy is gone, but the idea of spending all day on my own reading books still sounds just as pleasing. He may have planted the seed, but I grew the garden all on my own.
In college I explored writing. I explored the purpose of the written word. In between all of the late night studying, the coffee, and the countless hours I spent stuck in my head trying to figure out what in the world I could possibly want to spend the rest of my life doing, I found solace in the experiences of fictitious characters. I found clarity in the mindless construction of sentences. I wrote to unscramble my thoughts, and when I got bored with my own life, I read about someone else’s. Up until college, I had never taken the time to dig up all the dirt within me and discover just how far the roots of my love for words had grown. After four semesters of studying marketing and literary publishing, and three more left before I am finished, I have found myself with dirt underneath my fingernails, and a much better understanding of how deeply rooted words are for me.
Words are not just a hobby for me. Words fuel my existence.