Words are my forte.
When I was a kid, I grew up in a religious cult in a predominantly white state, and my words made people forget that I was an alien creature from a foreign land. As a teenager, words are how I got myself into things (cool parties, disastrous relationships, jail) and how I got myself out of things (speeding tickets, sketchy flophouses, heaven). And now, as a not-young-but-not-like-old adult, the truthful ones are my passion. Words have, and always will be, my “with great power comes great blah blah blah”.
In a way, I came out of my biological mother’s womb a liar. Because what is dishonesty, if not the absence of truth? My origin story has so many plot holes and untraceable twists that my stress-addled baby brain had to make shit up from the get. I told myself that I hadn’t been abandoned, but instead put up for adoption because my bio parents cared for me so much that they would sacrifice a genetic bond so that I could have a better life. I told myself that had I not come to America, I’d be sitting on the dirt floor of a dilapidated dojo or toiling away in a sun-beaten rice paddy.
Growing up in the environment that I did, it didn’t take me long to realize that words didn’t always have to mean exactly what you said; that they could be half-truths, and sometimes no-truths. I’d listen to my grandpa tell his tall tales about World War II (“and then three of those bastards came at me from out of the bush, but only one walked away”), and I’d watch our Mormon church do the same thing on a much grander scale (“there are three tiers of heaven and you can only get to the highest one if you pay us”).
These moments piled up until one day it was as if the earth cracked in half, tectonic plates shifted and dry-humped each other, and the ultimate life cheat code was revealed to me: you can just say shit. My deceptions expanded beyond what I had—up until that point—only told myself, and I began to vocalize them to others. Using counterfeit words, I started to make myself out to be smarter, cooler, more accomplished, more laid back, more everything than I actually was. And it paid off…until it didn’t.
In my late teen years/early twenties, my gift of gab ran me out of my hometown—wreaking havoc and seriously destroying relationships in my wake—something that I regret so deeply that I now often find myself holding my breath, unable to speak (and subsequently unable to lie). For as much as I had a grasp on the English language, I couldn’t articulate or process my feelings of isolation, unknowing, or being “the other”. So what’s a girl to do? Reinvent herself, natch! But what if one doesn’t know who they are to begin with?
Many of you already know the rest of the story, so I won’t delve into it much here, but I was a miserable sack of shit who moved to New York City with the intention of starting anew and becoming a real writer. Though the objective was never to do so, after struggling with big city prices for a few months, I reverted back to my old shysty ways to make ends meet. I went buck-fucking-and-butt-fucking-wild, making bad decision after horrible decision after unforgivable decision, all by using my words.
Now, fifteen years and hundreds of hours of therapy later, I understand the importance of speaking all of the words that I had replaced with lies. Not just thinking them. Not just writing them. But actually verbalizing and using them. And not just for myself, but for everyone—family, friends, strangers, people whose words have been silenced for far too long.
Clunky syllables, consonants, and vowels are all we really have in this life, and how we use them can make or break us. For me, they’ve done both.
Anyway, welcome to my Substack.
