Your loss, my friend

Describing myself accordingly

Today’s accompanying tune: “How Did it End” by Taylor Swift

Language has taken me as its prodigy from a young age. I would use words my parents didn’t understand, a vocabulary gleaned from the books I snuck home in a secret pocket I sewed into my backpack, lest my contraband be confiscated. I often mispronounced words when I said them aloud, only drawing attention to their origins on the page instead of the ear, an absorption of my secret life instead of the one I lived at home. By high school, teachers and classmates teased that I used AP words, or choice vocabulary that would earn an extra point or two on standardized exams. As if the words had to work for anyone besides me. When tasked with a vocabulary assignment in English class of my junior year of high school, I assigned myself “superfluous,” so fun was its sound to repeat during my class presentation, heavy on the ornamental. The presentation didn’t win me any friends, to say the least, but I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

Before I graduated, I decided that I wanted to be a journalist, a noble profession built only on a love of learning and a meticulous attention to vocabulary. At least, that’s what I though. I had read each story, each piece, so meticulously that I assumed each word intentional, each sentence constructed to convey both surface and subsurface meaning. But as I quickly learned, journalists write for the masses, and the masses had a roughly third-grade reading comprehension level. At least, that’s what I learned as I went through high school, and I suspect that estimation too may have decreased along with our attention spans. Beautiful language was redlined and replaced with something a bit more to the point. Paragraphs artfully sculpting the page were replaced by bullet points, an apt name for the stain it renders on the page, as if it had been shot through and all we were left with were these meager words. The lower I stooped, the narrower my vocabulary became. After all, didn’t everyone just want me to get to the point so they could tell their own version of the same story? So that they could summarize the news of the day, the point of the story, at their next social gathering? Wasn’t that the reason I wrote news at all? To give readers a talking point, a “something they’ve read” even if it was summarized in a 20-second video instead of the intentional, nuanced thing I had labored over?

It’s hard to know, really, what was worth it. Whether my attention to detail alienates others, makes them feel inferior, gets my point across. How many words you have to research after reading this essay, and whether you wanted to look them up in the first place. I cannot deny that writing, that exploring the limits of the language I practice, is an undeniable source of joy for me. It also invites unending discomfort, an unending amount of self-policing instilled in me from an early age and reinforced time and time again in adulthood. I believe, at a fundamental level, that words mean things. The words I say, the words I write. They are all selected meticulously from the vast repertoire of words at my disposal for a reason. And maybe that’s the writer in me — it should be something I care about, as someone who writes for a living. But still, I struggle with how to write this essay each week, how to describe its contents to others, because I worry the emotion contained in so many of my words spoken or written will scare people off. Make them think I’m too passionate about something they don’t care about, that they will roll their eyes about an emotional topic that doesn’t concern them and they’re only asking to appear polite. The journalist in me wants so badly to be accessible, to make beautiful things available to everyone. That I am no one special, I have nothing special to say. If anything, my ramblings are just more junk in your inbox. And believe me, plenty of people like to tell me that. Tell me how I waste their time, prove themselves in real life conversations as they tune out as soon as I expand into a second sentence. And for them, I’ve decided to adopt a bit of a mantra, if you will: your loss, my friend.

You’re losing interest, a willingness to talk about something that may not directly relate to you at this specific time in your life. That you’re losing the chance to learn about someone, maybe not me but someone like me, someone that shares something with me. We’re not any better than anyone else, but we do bring a different perspective to the table, whatever it may be. And it is your loss to never know what it is, exactly, that you’re missing.

Words seem small, seem inconsequential. We don’t mean it. We misspoke. We revise and edit and try to say exactly the right thing but get irate when someone takes us at our word. Lean on words unspoken, rules unbroken because they are never said aloud. But if literature is any indication, we want words to mean something. We value and adopt words with meaning, phrases that are clever, ways to describe the ways we feel without exploring the ways in which we feel. It all matters, and I’m very, very tired of pretending they don’t for fear of being myself. For fear of seeming intense, too much, too smart, too pretentious, too precocious. If you don’t know, look it up.

Here’s to being what you are, how you are, and describing yourself accordingly.

- Megan