Words have always been important to me. They’ve always been a comfort, something I could rely on. I always read books and can get lost into a story and never want it to finish. Creatively, writing has ebbed and flowed. As a kid I wrote short stories, as a teenager I wrote poetry and song lyrics, and then school came along and I LOVED writing (most) essays for school. Maybe this was because I am opinionated, but I enjoyed stitching my thoughts together through my keyboard. And now as adult, with my short stories and this blog, written words are therapeutic. I’ve been known to write hand written letters to friends just because.
Words are powerful. I know I use my words to convey how I feel often and a lot. That’s how I let my people know how much they mean to me. I tell them. I also show them but more often than not I value expression through language. So when someone doesn’t express themselves the same way I do, I often have to remind myself that words aren’t everybody’s friend. That words, however therapeutic they are to me, can be terrifying or difficult to think of for some. That there are other ways they express their love for me.
When you know how you best express your love and yourself it makes it easier to see how others do. And when you see how others express themselves, you can better understand their world. When we better understand each other’s worlds – especially when it comes to people we are in some form of relationship with – we can work towards a better world for everyone. We have to understand there is more than one way of doing things. When we understand where people are coming from, why they feel the way they do, why they act the way they do, we become better humans. It makes it a little easier to build a world with many different skills than having one individual tell everyone their way is wrong and do everything their way, no matter how experienced they may be. It just doesn’t work.
So be a better human. Discover your way of expressing yourself. Do you use words? Are you a physical touch kind of person? Do you tell people how you care by things you do for them? Or maybe it’s a combination. Either way, OWN IT! 🙂