Words matter. They just do. It can be hard to remember, let alone believe, given how flippantly we use them with each other, in the media, with ourselves …. But each word carries weight, even the tiniest of prepositions.
I grew up in the land of words, one where my dad would fervently correct Joan Osborne on the radio every time ‘What if God Was One of Us’ would play. “It is were, Lauren, not was. This song is grammatically incorrect. What if God were one of us, were!,” he would emphasize. Yet the reality is, I have been obsessed with words for as long as I can recall. Their meaning and spelling, etymology and origin, sound and rhythm.
The first conflict I had with my great love was in kindergarten, when I wrote a ‘p’ instead of a ‘c’ next to a picture of a cucumber, not understanding that one object could have multiple words associated with it, in this case, the Spanish, pepino. From there it was endless reading, in the closet with a flashlight long after my sister’s and my bedtime in our shared room, and dictionary exploration, just because. Then began the writing, initially short sentences comprising homework, then speeches meticulously penned for Student Council, and then, ultimately, joy.
Words became and still are my greatest form of expression, my stakehold into ‘creativity,’ perhaps even one of my oh-so-cliched ‘super powers.’ They do not always flow, but when they do, I relish in the pitter patter of the phrase catching up to the sentence rounding out the paragraph and crossing the finish line into a complete piece. A perfect race against no one except my own mind, desperately trying to grasp that thought, that feeling, that… that, before it disappears.
Putting words together was tough enough on pen and paper. Then the dreaded typewriter. Then the Macintosh 128K. And ultimately, the phone. But now my fight is not with the medium, but rather the lurking AI, who persistently urges me to say one thing versus the other, to use a preposition that in fact entirely changes the meaning of what my brain is trying to convey and being is trying to emit. Even this sentence was a technical battle to get to come out the way I wanted it, the invisible bots changing self perceived elegance into shortened contractions, and reversing word order into a simpler, less thoughtful, dare I say, dumbed down, world order.
And to think that the true battle, the only crusade that really matters is, and should always be, in the mind, the human mind. The one that compiles years of history and experiences with observations and stories told and untold into that one small sequence that, hopefully, compounded, becomes a narrative worth reading.
The harsh reality is, words do not just come out as techies have been slowly brainwashing us to believe. Good words are constructed and strewn, weaved and morphed, first inside our body and our souls, and then into our minds. Then and only then, they come alive. In fact, they only come to life because of who we are - who you are, who I am, the live beings that actually write them. It is our voice and our history. Our identity and our dream.
One of my first childhood dreams was to become a published author. Luckily enough, that has happened twice, but what you see as you flip the pages of each book is decades of labor, of emotions, of learnings, of relationships, of practice, of hard work that had absolutely nothing to do with the words on the page. Distilled, pondered, written, deleted, crumpled up, rehashed, and rewritten over runs and swims, glasses of wine and mugs of coffee, drenched in literal blood, sweat and tears, not even including the wrestling matches with literary agents and publishing houses. The books were my first two births, ones no technology can, or ever will, replicate.
And then I ran out of words. Poof. Done. Drained. Empty. Finito. After a decade of five blog posts a week, four newsletters a month, and two social media posts a day, not to mention weekly speeches and lectures, and the books themselves, I became incapable of writing; literally nothing - nothing - would come out. It was one of the darker periods of my life, a Kafka-esque crisis as my first love vanished, and I remained, empty, lost, and oddly not even longing for more.
It was in that period, Between the Waves, that I realized that writing and words are a finite treasure, one that comes from a well deep within, one that needs to be inspired by, not inspired from. It took years for me to come back, and I only did, here, in the deep silence of covid, personal loss, and grieving, the precise remedy needed to resuscitate the passion, skill, dare I say, need.
Words are what set us apart, what keep us alive as individuals and a species. To take our voice and turn it into no one’s, claiming it is everyone’s, could create one of humanity’s biggest tragedies, and all in the name of (let us be real) - money. As a writer, an author, above all, a human, the concern is not one of robbing me, but rather, destructing us.
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Yes! Your words help me reunite with mine. No more spurning the literary imperative, lest I shed vocabulary and poetry further still!