Enjoy the Silence

Words like violence Break the silence Come crashing in Into my little world Painful to me Pierce right through me Can’t you understand Oh my little girl All I ever wanted All I ever needed Is here in my arms Words are very unnecessary They can only do harm Maybe that's a little extreme, but it's partially true. But then, Depeche Mode is not a bastion of light and positivity, are they? My mother always warned me as a child to beware what I wrote down, because I couldn't take it back. Lo, such sage advice. I should listen to my mother more, perhaps. The problem endemic to language is that, no matter how precisely you speak, you will never convey a complete sense of what is going on in your head... what you envision. .. just what exactly, to every last infinitesimal detail you mean. But language is all we have to express ourselves. Be it words or body language, this is it. And both, even when used in tandem, are imperfect. I have come to enjoy having this blog as an outlet. In one way it's creative, in another it allows me to formulate what I want to say with more precision. And with the edit function, I can in some ways take what I've written down back. But I have no desire to do such a thing beyond merely trivial edits like italicizing something or correcting the structure of a sentence. I don't want to live my life with regrets, though regrets are part of everyone's package. So this is what it is - what I feel about a particular isolated topic, sometimes devoid of complete context. The trick with words is to use them in a way that doesn't do harm. For many of us, that can be a struggle and we may not even realize it. Life is ultimately all about attitude. And attitude is colored by context. You don't understand a person until you understand what colors their world. You pretty much have to develop a certain sensitivity to what they think and feel. You can't predict the way someone is going to react to something unless you understand the world in which they view it. That is the hard part. Sometimes we all have strains of empathy, but those strains are fleeting. This is a never-ending struggle. So what? I guess I am smarting because I feel like I was misunderstood - partly because of this blog - and I refuse to give up this outlet for anyone. And now I'm trying to express myself in ways where the words are lovingly written, not as retaliation. This blog is not the end-all of what I think; any entry is just a tightly focused microcosm of what I'm thinking or feeling. Again, I wish I could just sweep you all into the vast expanse of what is going on in my psyche so that you could understand every reaction to stimuli, to predict which way I'd react to some other thing. But if you've been reading long enough, you know that that's tempered by a lot of things, and some of those things are struggles - my religious views, my moral views, my legal views, and how they all don't necessarily mesh. Even I can't give you an answer as to how I might react to any given thing under whatever given circumstances. Sometimes I wonder if I should just self-censor and keep quiet about things. I mean, we as people - every last one of us - do that all the time in varying degrees with everyone that we come in contact with. But then, what good does integrating all the bad things do for me? Nothing. It might give me an ulcer. But biting the tongue isn't always bad; it's just a matter of when to do it and where to vent afterward. And you, my pistol-whipped blog, are one source of venting. Get over yourself, you aren't the only one. If something less than pleasant comes into my life, you are likely to hear about it here because I likely don't have another outlet. But as this is not an exclusive outlet, some of what I mean may be lost in the translation. I like to think that the words I may have expressed earlier count for something. I don't like to say things that I don't mean. I like to think that I'm candid - blunt - enough to say what I say and stand by what I say. I have my convictions, yes, and I can't explain everything. I wish I could; I know the logic of how I arrived at feeling any particular way must escape some of you. But truth be told: we are all bundles of paradoxes and dichotomies when words are given or received without substantial context. This blog is only part of the context at any given time. There is always so much more. And I am not going to think myself into the ground to explain it all, though I probably have given the impression that I already have. But then, the depth of how far I think and my pain threshold is known only to me, isn't it? That is just endemic to life. Words can do harm, and words can do good, and words can do something well. Someone said sometime and somewhere that we are not responsible for what others think, but what we give them reason to think. The hard part is controlling what we give reason to think. That's all that we can be sorry for. But why be sorry? Bite thy tongue...