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The Weight of Words
A gentle reminder of the power of words
My sister is autistic and a male-to-female transsexual. She’s in the particularly sensitive position of being, on the one hand, incapable of real emotional maturity and, on the other, a subject of scorn for many. As I saw her yesterday in tears rejecting the internet — where she has long since dreamed of having some sliver of stardom, like all of us content-selling, modern forty-niners — I realized how the tiny ripple of a word that comes forth from a mouth can reverberate into a tsunami by the time it reaches the ear of its hearer.
All of us say things all the time. There is no behavior we engage in so casually that can have such a profound effect on others. We’d never walk through a crowd swinging our arms around wildly, but words we recklessly shoot about. The position of a parent, or teacher, or lover, can be wreathed with such power that an unconscious, offhand remark can shake another’s world. Those bruised areas of our personhood, our traumas and insecurities, can be dealt a crushing blow by a flitting word.
The anonymity of the internet has given a new ease and casualness to cruelty. A perfectly normal example of a human being can happen to respond to this or that in a comment section and bring down another person’s mood. On the part of the commenter it is at worst a sort of naughty…
