The Words We Choose and the Words We Use

While I am currently a seminarian, I am old enough that I have been out in the ‘Verse for a while. I have a dating history, and I often joke that my history would shock and appall Taylor Swift.

I have a tendency to choose my words with care and sometimes with caution. I also know that I have a bit of a temper at times, and so I hold my tongue more often than most people know. There are times when I am downright angry and yet I say nothing. Ever since my TBI (https://steemit.com/mental-health/@phoenix32/the-strangest-of-days-or-how-a-traumatic-brain-incident-altered-my-life-inexorably), I have not been nearly as good as holding back the torrents of my emotions, but it has happened that I have been infuriated and kept it locked away internally. Even still, I choose my words carefully, making certain that what I say can only be misconstrued when taken out of context

Especially when dating, I made certain to choose my words carefully because I know that words can hurt, words can offend, and words can cause rifts, some of them irreparable.

“Lavanda” was one of the fiery redheads in my life, the redhead who captured my attention the most of all. She had a peculiar family history, and being the youngest of her family with a mother who is staggeringly co-dependent and over-bearing led to her, in turn, being co-dependent. As a result of this, we created an insular world for ourselves to which we could escape. She had “free rein” of the second floor of her parents’ house, the only thing missing being a kitchen. I say “free rein” in scare-quotes because the reality of it is that her mother’s co-dependence would not allow “Lavanda” to actually have space of her own.

The positive aspect of this was that “Lavanda’s” mother left us alone more often than not, as she was not comfortable around me; I have some Italian blood in me, and the neighborhood in which she grew up was full of mafiosos, which meant that she had an irrational fear of me, the (at the time) school teacher. So it really was like our own little world at times — we watched our movies and TV shows, played our video games, read our books, cuddled and all of that cutesy dating stuff. I thought that we were growing to know each other, although that proved to be a bit damning in other regards…

[Side bar: I grew to know “Lavanda” better than she came to know me, to the point where she actually was angry with me once for not reading her mind. Yes. She thought it was borderline telepathy. In reality, it was reading the patterns of her behavior and accurately predicting what she would do next. She rarely surprised me when it came to her reactions and responses. I, on the other hand, would surprise her fairly often, as it turned out…]

“Lavanda” liked to identify things and loosely categorize, as she was a librarian, so she tended to call our insular little world by a name: “Fairy Bullsh!t Land."

I did not like that name.

Firstly, that is not just me censoring this. As much as I like to keep my language clean these days, rated PG or less as often as possible, that was how she spelled it on the mix CD she made me.

[Side bar: So kids, here’s a tale from the days of yore, when your Uncle @phoenix32 was younger than you! When you had a crush on someone, you recorded songs that made you think of that person onto this thing called a cassette tape. You either dubbed it from one tape to another, or you recorded it off the radio. Tapes were replaced with CDs, which turned out to be easier to make, and eventually MP3 playlists. I’m sure now it is a Spotify playlist, a Pandora station, or a YouTube list.]

See, it was not supposed to be “Bullsh!t." It was supposed to be a refuge, a haven, a place where she and I could get to know each other. A place where we could grow both as individuals and as a couple. And by her calling it “Bullsh!t”, well, it set the tone that it was a disposable and unimportant concept. Applying the label of “Fairy” meant that it was unrealistic to her.

And she wondered why things did not work out.
And for a while, I wondered why I knew her better than she knew me.

Case in point… for one of our anniversaries, we decided to stay on a budget. I went out and I shopped carefully to get her things that I knew she would like. She, on the other hand, “shopped” (yes, more scare-quotes) in the back room of the library and got stuff. One cool thing was a cartridge for the game Final Fantasy V for the Super Famicom, the Japanese equivalent of the Super Nintendo.

This would have been a really awesome gift, as I enjoyed the game thoroughly when I played it on an emulator years prior, and I would love to have played it on the original system. Except:

• I don’t read Japanese (I had a patch for the ROM)
• I would need an adapter for my Super Nintendo to play Super Famicom games
• I full well know that she did not search for this particular item, but stumbled across it in her travels at work

Granted, I knew that we were working on a budget, trying to keep it under $20 or $30. I really tried to take that into consideration, but I knew, I just knew that she did not put the effort into it that I did. When we eventually did break up somewhere down the line, I asked her about it and she admitted to that, if I recall correctly.

The moniker of “Fairy Bullsh!t Land” became self-fulfilling. If she had called our insular little world something more positive, like “Our Cozy Corner”, I can almost guarantee that we both would have grown together, and we might even be married now. But I cannot, for the life of me, think of a single person who would want to live in a place with the word “Bullsh!t” in the name.

I had mentioned “Hannah” in a previous post (https://steemit.com/mental-health/@phoenix32/the-ghost-of-grudges-long-since-past), and I have to say that, gun to my head, she is most likely the “one who got away." That’s a massive admission, and one that I have only recently come to acknowledge. I had given her my heart in a particular way that I had not to anyone else, but even still, I know that she was not completely in with her whole heart.

“Hannah” and I had a great dynamic. I love to cook, and she was not a huge fan of it at all. She had little talent for it, by her own admission (so please don’t think I am picking on her), and she preferred doing dishes, which was great because I detest washing dishes. Getting together was always fun, although like most of the women I dated in the intervening years between leaving seminary and then returning, she had the palate of a toddler. Knowing that I was running low on ideas without getting too repetitive, and wanting to make her happy, I resorted to asking her what she wanted to eat, or what she was in the mood for, primarily because I wanted to make her happy by cooking food that she would enjoy, and also because I was running out of ideas. Her response was usually three words: “I don’t care."

I’m not an idiot, mind you. I knew that she was saying that she did not mind if what I made was something that we had eaten recently, or that she had no preference, or was not craving something in particular. I knew that. However, to state that you are planning on putting in a special effort for someone only to be met with the words “I don’t care” really takes the wind out of one’s sails. There was a time when I was mentally replacing her words with what I had hoped was the meaning behind those words; that sort of self-delusion would only have lasted had she shown that she cared. It reached a point where I barely had an inkling that she cared, and we just went through the motions, kinda like Buffy in season 7…

Frankly, her “I don’t care” was the oral equivalent of receiving “K” as a text message in response to something important. So as much as I loved her, as much as I was in love with her, I also know that her words, too, came to fruition, as she stopped caring at some point.

I know that I had mentioned “Lynn” at some point (https://steemit.com/mental-health/@phoenix32/the-strange-days-that-followed-or-my-new-life-and-the-new-person-i-had-become-post-tbi-part-3). She had a daughter who was 17 when “Lynn” and I had met and began to date. “Lynn” and I are long over, mind you, but some particular events come to mind. She did not like the fact that I had a collection of graphic novels, comic books, and merchandise from the franchises, to the point where she repeatedly called it “stupid” and informed me that if we moved in together that my stuff would “have to go” and that she would “never have that junk in her house.”

Another occasion, one in particular, I had taken “Lynn” and her daughter out to dinner. The server brought over our food and I quietly made the Sign of the Cross, folded my hands, and prayed grace before meals. “Lynn” at least waited until I was finished before making a big deal of it — it would seem that, according to her, I was making a scene by praying, and everyone was watching and staring, and the server must be uncomfortable, blah blah blah blah. I was glancing around while she was going off, and it seemed to me that people who had not paid any attention to us at all were now starting to look over at us. “Lynn’s” daughter turned to her and said, “Mom, could you just let him go? I’m an atheist and it doesn’t bother me when he prays. Stop being such a cold-hearted b**** to him. Can’t you see that he loves you?” Usually, however, “Lynn’s” daughter was not there to back me up, and “Lynn” gave me a hard time about my faith, praying, and my interests.

I have seen what careless words have done to new relationships and to 30 year marriages, and the results are always the same — tons of hurt, fractured relationships, and weeks and months to undo the damage done in the few moments it takes to speak just a few words. And it is even worse when the words are repeated. Like falling water, the words can wash over you in a single torrent, cutting off your source of air and light; or the words can drip on you, often and frequently, striking in the same spot over and over again, wearing a hole in you.

There’s tone and facial expression.
There’s an overuse of sarcasm or humor.
There’s a lack of interest in someone else’s hobbies.
There’s a complete disdain for things that someone else enjoys.
There’s catching someone on a bad day.
There’s having a bad day yourself.
There’s a difference of opinion.

But if there is truly a love between two people — whatever the nature of that love — then there should be some consideration between them regarding the words that they use when addressing each other. None of that should ever be cause for someone to use words that they can never take back.