when I became ill, they took on a broader meaning. I felt like a walking signifier, signifying a person I could never quite be. There was a gap between what I looked like and what I felt like. And the only way to bridge that gap was by talking and writing about what was going on inside me. And yes, in the philosophical sense, words are never quite the thing they describe, but that is also their use. They can help externalize internal things. The moment we try and turn a thought into words we place it into a shared world. This shared world we call “language.” Once we take our personal unseen experiences and make them seen, we help others, and even ourselves, to understand what we are going through. What we say aloud can never quite capture what we feel inside, but that is almost the point.
Words don’t capture, they release.
Words (two)
So, yes.
Words are important.
Words can hurt. Words can heal. Words can comfort.
There was a time when I couldn’t speak.
There was a time when my depression was so heavy my tongue wouldn’t move. A time when the distance between the open gate of my mouth and the storm of my mind seemed too far.
I could manage monosyllables, sometimes.
I could nod. I could mumble. But I sounded as if I were in slow motion. Underwater.
I was lost.
To want to speak was to want to live. And in those depths I wanted neither. I just wanted to want, if that makes sense.
I remembered reading Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings at school. I remember reading about how, as a child, she had stopped talking for five years after suffering the most horrific sexual abuse at the hands of her mother’s boyfriend, Mr. Freeman. When the man was killed by her uncles, eight-year-old Maya felt such guilt for his death that she stopped talking, becoming effectively mute for years. It was through a family friend and teacher, Bertha Flowers, that Maya was exposed to great writers. She read Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Dickens and Shakespeare and the poets Georgia Douglas Johnson and Frances Harper. Slowly, through reading and learning, Maya found her voice again, and never let it go. By the late 1960s this mute girl had become one of the key voices of the civil rights movement. A voice that not only spoke for herself, but for millions of people facing racial discrimination.
Language gives us the power to voice our experience, to reconnect with the world, and to change our own and other people’s lives.
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you,” wrote Angelou. Silence is pain. But it is a pain with an exit route. When we can’t speak, we can write. When we can’t write, we can read. When we can’t read, we can listen. Words are seeds. Language is a way back to life. And it is sometimes the most vital comfort we have.
The power of why
One thing I have been asked a few times is this: “Does writing about bad experiences make you feel worse?”
I understand why people ask the question, but for me the answer is a profound “No.”
I discovered this years ago. When I was very ill, at the lowest of the low, when I could hardly speak, I wrote down what I was feeling. One day I wrote down the words “invisible weight.” Another day I wrote “I wish I could claw into my head and take out the part of my brain that makes me feel like this.” There were even darker things I put down. But writing down darkness didn’t make me feel dark. I already felt dark. Writing things down brought that inner darkness into external light.
Nowadays, I sometimes write about what I want. The key to this is honesty. Be brutally, humiliatingly honest. I recommend this.
For instance, you could write “I want a six-pack.”
And seeing that wish on the page might automatically make you realize something about it. It might make you feel silly for having it. You might already be awakening another part of you that helps you diminish the craving. But either way, it is good to ask a single-word question after it. “Why?” Why do I want a six-pack? Then to be entirely honest in your answer. “I want to look good.” And again: “Why?” “For myself.” And then you might stare at that answer for a while and feel you weren’t being entirely honest. So you add: