Words

7/6/22

Words

I have always written better than I could speak. Whenever I try to speak I always stumble over my words—it’s embarrassing, I think faster than I can get the words out and I try to speak so fast that when they do come out they’re all jumbled together or flipped so the the beginning of one word starts the other.

My writing always spoke more eloquently than I could, it represented a more put together version of myself. There would be times that I beat myself over the head for fumbling my words, but whenever I would read back my old essays I’d be in awe at how well I worded them. When writing an argumentative essay, all my points were always laid out and articulated perfectly. My argument was irrefutable. When I would argue with my speech, I could never quite articulate what I was feeling. My words stuck together, or couldn’t come out of my mouth at all. I kept it simple with words like, “Ok”, and “Nothing”, or “Nevermind”, and “It’s fine.” My speech could never fully capture all the thoughts that ran through my mind, it was like on the way down from my brain to my mouth the words lost their meaning and it all felt pointless.

Maybe the words written down always came out better because I had to take my time to write out every letter and their individual curves or lines. When speaking, I rush so much. Words have always been more powerful to me when written down because of their permanency and tangibleness.

I have written down every emotion I have ever felt. Do I have all those written copies? No, but I know for a fact that those words are somewhere on a piece of paper, or electronically typed out, existing.

Written down words are the only safe space I feel I have, it’s almost ironic that a piece of writing that anyone could pick up and read is where I feel the safest. Writing it down proves that it existed, that it was real.