Let me tell you about words.

Let me tell you about LOUD words. About how if that’s all you’ve ever had in your ears, you have a stunted ability to recognize just how loud the words actually are, until you find yourself in the company of soft words.

Let me tell you about years – YEARS – of my husband not even having to raise his voice, but just get a little grumpy or serious or even simply less perky than usual, sending me into cyclonic panic that he was angry with me, that I had done something wrong or something to upset him and it would trigger argument. That’s what a lifetime of being raised in fire and brimstone and the expectation of tiptoeing silently on hot coals around everyone else does to a person who’s attempting to participate in a healthy relationship as an adult. You learn that conflict and violence is so inevitable that you end up manifesting it for yourself because you don’t fucking know how else to “be”!

Words are oxygen. Silence is strangling.

Let me tell you about being told your whole life that you’re too wordy, you take too many words to say things, you’re overly verbose, you have too much to say. Let me tell you about existing as one big intense run-on sentence. Let me tell you about words flowing out of every orifice of your body like a water jug punctured with holes, about talking quickly because you’re used to having to fight like hell to be heard at all, and every word you share is a drop of water you feel blessed was allowed to escape. Let me tell you about how if you’re lecturing me about talking too much and asking too many questions and having too many ideas and using too many goddamn words, and I go silent, it’s not necessarily because you’re right, but because I’ve reverted to feeling like I’m not being heard and don’t see the point in wasting more words on you.

Let me tell you about getting into writing at a very young age, because you just needed someone or something to fucking listen, and the blank page never demands that you shut up. In fact, it demands the opposite. “Fill me with your words, overrun me with them,” the blank page insists, “and don’t leave anything out!” Let me tell you about having far more skill in written word than oral conversation, because oral conversation always meant screaming and judgment and conflict, while writing was a safe haven, comforting and so so so blissfully quiet.

Let me tell you about how being more skilled with writing than spoken word even transferred into foreign language learning. I studied advanced Spanish in high school and was fluent by the time I graduated – and then unfortunately never spoke it again. Therein lies the rub with testing out of college course requirements via advanced high school studies – you end up exempting yourself from all the things you’re good at and enjoy! I missed the memo that said just because I tested out of it, didn’t mean I couldn’t continue to pursue studying those subjects – oops! Anyway, over fifteen years out from my senior year of high school, I have very halting ability to speak Spanish now, and understand it decently but not spectacularly – but I can write in it, and translate written work. Words are funny sometimes.

Let me tell you about those soft words I finally came across in my late 20s. The words from my husband, few and far between sometimes, and how markedly different that really was from anything I’d ever known. How we all joke about how reticent he is compared to me. How that works, it really works, because who are we kidding – I have enough words for both of us, and then some.