Am I coming through loud and clear?
Is what I say easy to understand?
Does it make sense?
Is it something that you connect with?
Can you see the pictures in your head?
I do my best, with each post I make, to say things that people understand, that people can read and, even if they disagree, will still know what I’m saying.
Sometimes I have a lot of trouble with communication. You’d think with how much I write here, on social media, in my stories, and in other places I would have the written word mastered, but it never really feels like that. I always feel like I’m struggling to put into words the ideas that are in my head.
Maybe that’s “normal” I don’t know, but I really do try to connect with people, to reach them. I want to share my thoughts, not drop them on top of people.
I remember when I was in elementary school, there were these girls in my class who would laugh at me and tell me I was always making up words. One of them told me, one day in yet another bullying session, “you’re conceited,” which is kind of funny because that’s a nice sized word for a 4th grader, and it was being used as an accusation against me for using words that other kids weren’t supposed to understand.
Now, the truth is, I did make up words as a child. If I found an idea that didn’t fit a word I already knew, I made up a word that “felt” right, but I never made the claim they were the proper word.
While learning the rules for language is something I dedicated a lot of time to doing properly, I’ve generally felt that words are fluid, because language is fluid. That doesn’t mean you can just take a well established word and force it to mean something else, we see a lot of that in our political and social discourse, but if a word doesn’t exist, why not make one? There’s no limit on letters and words, we can use them however we want. They’re free.
I remember in middle school a teacher asking me why I tried to sound smarter than I was, and I had no answer for them, because I wasn’t trying to sound smarter than I actually was, I was using words I had read from my earliest memories of childhood.
I guess there are people who think I use long words, or that I use obscure words to look smarter or sound better than other people, and that has never been true. When I’m visualizing a sentence, while looking at the image in my head (I see concepts laid out in pictures), I describe it using the vocabulary I have, and supplement it with other words if necessary based on context and how the image “feels.”
There is never a moment where I’m trying to look smarter. Are you kidding? I was bullied for the first 20 years of my life because of how I spoke and the vocabulary I used to communicate with others.
It’s why I am not strict on verbiage, especially on the internet. As long as I understand you, we’re doing just fine. You don’t have to impress me, you don’t have to use flawless diction, I sure as shit won’t, and you don’t have to be intimidated if I use a word you didn’t catch, because all you have to do is ask me to repeat myself, and I will automatically change the way I said it before. THAT is something I HAVE picked up in my 44 years on this earth.
It’s probably why I could never be an actor. I read lines, I absorb the gist and the concept of the words being said, work out the context and the meaning, and then when I say them again, they’ve already been modified to better fit my cadence of speech.
That’s how my brain works. :/
I’m not here to compete with you, and I never have been. Believe me, it was nice when people thought I was the smart person in school, but it brought more ridicule than anything outside of tests and homework. I just wanted people to like me, and I’d often hide from being seen whenever I could.
That particular aspect of my personality is a post for another day.
.Red
