Use your words

I am – to put it kindly – an opinionated person.  Less kindly, but perhaps more accurately, I am a mouthy cow.  I always have been.  This is the result of being raised by highly articulate, argumentative people who frankly didn’t have the patience to treat me like a child, even when I was one.  While I would rarely be fobbed off with a simple and unequivocal “Because I SAY SO!”, if my parents took the trouble to argue with me, then they were playing to win.  I wasn’t going to get my own way (or even the time of day) unless I was able to put forward a compelling argument.

And then there was the question of my cultural consumption. I refused to learn to read at all until I was five years old.  My resolve was finally cunningly undermined by my grandmother.  On my fifth birthday, she displayed a pair of beautifully illustrated hard-back books she had bought me (The Secret Garden and A Little Princess, if you’re asking) and then ostentatiously handed them to my father for safe keeping, saying what a shame it was they were no use to me yet, but that he could look after them for me until I had learnt to read them myself.  I got those books within the month.  I read them; then I read everything else.  My tastes were catholic: I read the standard children’s fare – comics, Judy annuals, and the inevitable Enid Blyton (resulting in a lifelong preoccupation with pork pies and ginger beer) – but also anything else I could lay my hands on: Catherine Cooksons at my nan’s, my father’s eclectic mix of Tolkien and Tolstoy, Dune and Louis L’Amour, and anything and everything in my mother’s glass-fronted book cabinet – a treasure trove of Terry Pratchett and Thomas Hardy alongside heavy tomes on genetics, astrology and zen, not to mention crack-spined copies of Lolita and the Kama Sutra, guiltily inhaled while standing by the shelf, one ear turned towards the living room door.

I loved to read, because I loved words.  Because words gave you power. They allowed you to put ideas in people’s heads.  And they allowed you to make people see you – really see the real you, whether they liked it or not.  Without them, I could only be what other people chose to see.  But by using my words, I could force them to see the parts of me I was proud of – that I was clever; that I could be funny; that I had all the same hormone-driven desires as my prettier peers, that no-one wanted to recognise could be roiling beneath my dumpy teenage surface.

Most importantly of all, words gave you the power to say what you wanted, explain why you wanted it, and prove that you deserved it.  They allowed me to take the mass of unmet wants and inchoate passions sloshing formlessly around in me, and shape them into something I could work with.  They gave me tools to track down the elusive truth of an argument, an idea, a person, to whittle and refine my concept of that truth until I was as close to it as it was possible to get.  And that proximity to what was real was an exhilirating drug I found I couldn’t do without.

The practical upshot of all this is that I am an INTENSELY verbal person.  I honestly don’t ever have a feeling that I can’t articulate – in fact, for me, the feeling barely exists until it is articulated.  I feel compelled to talk about things that are difficult or painful, or that I just don’t understand, as it is only by reasoning my way through them with words that any kind of resolution is achieved.  An unexplored emotion will nag at me like a sore tooth, and I just cannot keep from prodding.  I’m lucky I was born when I was, not a few hundred years ago, or I’d barely have been out of the scold’s bridle or off the ducking stool I fear.  Simply put, the worst thing anyone can do to me is present me with a problem and then say “I don’t want to talk about it.”

However.  There are people I encounter with whom this characteristic is a problem.  What works for me does not necessarily work for them, and my need for clarity and conclusion can on occasion actually inhibit them.  Some feel intimidated by the demand that they verbalise their thoughts and feelings on sensitive or complicated subjects even to themselves, never mind a third party.  Others are intuitive, instinctive people, for whom it is enough to simply feel a thing without having to define what it is and why.  I have had to learn to know when to stop with these people, because what to me is an exchange of views, feels to them like an argument; what from my perspective is an investigation of who they are and how they feel, to them is an intrusive interrogation.

Because my power lies so completely in my words, power over me resides in silence – not just those who can force me to be silent (mercifully few since leaving school), but those who have mastered silence themselves, who refuse to be drawn at all onto my home turf.  It is a method of control that seems to go much deeper than mine, than grappling the world to the ground with words.  Satyagraha means “insistence on the truth”, but is exemplified by passive resistance – it is what I always think of when I encounter one of these people, who are capable of sitting with a feeling or a fact without needing to understand or argue with it, to challenge or to change it.  I envy those who hold this alien power, frustrated by their power over me – for if they won’t give me their words, I cannot share or shape them, must stand struck dumb before them, seeing only what they choose to let me see.