Random Rant #14

I went overboard with #13. I wrote it on a drunken night and exposed too much of my soul in it. After serious thought, I decided I couldn't let it see the light of day - let it lie hidden in the dark dungeons of the drafts. But neither can I deny its existence by reusing the number...

My mind is like a fickle day - sunny one moment and raining the next. In an instance, in a second, with one word, one message, a single idea. Actions speak louder than words - sticks and stones will break your bones, but words will never hurt you. One of the biggest lies popular culture has imparted on us. Words will never hurt you? Will words never hurt you? How many times have we been hurt by words? How is it that words can never hurt you but the pen is mightier than the sword? Returning to my favorite theme, words are one of the things that define us as humans. It is in our nature to rely on words. Words cannot hurt you if they are uttered by somebody you do not trust. If you trust the person speaking them, however, they can hurt more than a stab wound. Words leave an imprint on our soul - denying them, reneging them, can leave a hole that will not heal. Even the absence of words can hurt us, the lack of a greeting, the lack of interest from someone we have allowed to come close to our true being. We leave ourselves vulnerable to words, especially in this digital era when many of our communications lack everything else - touch, eye contact, even the tone and expression of voice. In this era, when written words are exchanged more than glances, how can we pretend they cannot hurt us? Stripped of paralinguistic communication, hollow and sterile, sterile but often infected at the same time, soulless and soulful, stripped even of the uniqueness of handwriting and the expression contained within, words are all we have left. A world of words, traveling through wires or through the airwaves as a series of 0 and 1, a series of No and Yes, a series of existence and non-existence. Spellchecked, copied and pasted, formatted words... sometimes bringing a flood of happiness and sometimes a world of pain...