Thursday, December 13, 2018

Words

Have you ever really thought about words?  Lots of us have learned the Greek and Latin roots to our English words.  But where did those roots come from?  How did they get their meanings? I mean you can go down a huge rabbit hole researching words and where they came from and their meanings. 

But lately, I'm understanding more and more that our relationships give our words meaning. 

Think about it...what hurts more: a stranger saying you're ugly or your best friend calling you ugly? Your best friend saying that would hurt more, right? It would for me. 

My mind is like a tape recorder, too.  It stores all the ugly things.  I can access all the mean things people have said to me.  For some reason, it's not so great about remembering the good things.  (There is an actual biological reason for this but I wouldn't bore you with it).

Every year we have a special education meeting for B.  Every three years they do a full re-evaluation of him.  We had this meeting yesterday.  It is not an easy meeting.  There are some good things about these meetings - we talk about his strengths and remind ourselves how much he's grown.  Because of the testing we do have to spend a lot of time going over his areas of struggle.  Not just talk about it but see the words projected on the screen.  Then you get a copy of all these words. 

Different people talk about him - his teachers, his behavior specialist, his principal, the professionals who test him.  We have different relationships with each of these people.  Their words effect us in different ways because of these relationships.  Some we interact with everyday and their words hurt a bit more.  Some we just deal with sporadically so their words don't sting quite as much. 

Some of those words just stick with me.  They play over and over in my head.  They hurt my heart, even though they weren't intended to.  I have to fight against them.  I have to game plan how to make them shut up, how to override them with the good things the same people say. 

It's so hard. It takes a while.  It's exhausting.  So, I just color or read or think of something else. But the words leave a hole in my heart, a hole that sometimes doesn't get filled.  And it hurts.



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