From the Raven: Words Hurt (Column)
What happens when words betray some deeper wounds? We have some thoughts
By Leah Eichler,
Writers are in the business of words. We think about them, use them like ropes to pull in our readers, or daggers to hurt them when they least expect it. So it’s no surprise that we think about language. A lot.
Which is why Maggie Smith’s first-person essay in The Cut, well, cut so deeply.
It starts off with the words that tie us together, in her case the poem she wrote several years ago that went viral. If you missed it, here it is all its glory:
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
I came across the poem a few years after it was published, in 2020. I stumbled on it in midst of a pandemic where many of us were trapped at home, with our children, trying to “sell them the world.” It was a hard sell for many of us, since we didn’t buy it ourselves.
Smith’s recent essay, however, talks about how the poem spelled the end of her marriage. Her husband, in bed, told her that she was now famous. He was sad about it, and she sensed him pulling away.
The essay — an excerpt from an upcoming memoir — led me to think about how words hurt. Simple words, ones you don’t think should hurt but do. Words that spelled the end of a relationship (I can name those!), words that you hear a parent tell a child that they will never forget. Words that you can never take back.
It made me remember how powerful (and damaging) words can be. We can wield them without ever forecasting the consequences. I’ve had writers send me stories that I’ve interpreted one way, and they intended a completely different way. We don’t get to choose how words are received.
It also reminded me of one of the first pieces of fiction we ever ran, called The Gift of Listening, by Rose Margaret Deniz, about a tarot card reader who could see everyone’s future but her own. Sometimes as writers, we have that gift, to see what others have coming way down the road, but not the crisis that’s right at our own front door, a type of literary hyperopia.
If you care, please feel free to share words that you never forgot, words you wish you didn’t say, words you wished you did.
Yours in reading and writing,
Leah Eichler, Managing Editor of Esoterica Magazine