is what I tell my mom, when these days she tells me to work for a publishing company, or write my own book as she has done. She wants me to make a living out of my words.
Words, or rather books, have been important in my life ever since I became an immigrant. When you leave a whole country and a whole language behind, you find yourself lost in an ocean of abstract sounds that carry no meaning. You’re forced to study a language instead of speak it, learning new ways in which words connect with one another. When my family came to the States in 2000, I had no friends, and didn’t know how to make them. So my mom pretty much gave up on my social skills and instead took me to the library. Every single day. (It was mostly because she didn’t know how to drive, and the library was on a straight path that required no turns from our house.)
Come to think of it now, I don’t know how I even learned a whole new language just by reading it. Imagine we could still have that skill when we’re older. But physically seeing words lined up in a book taught me the connection of words and how simply changing the order can drastically change its meaning. Words still affect me strongly—the way in which a friend says something will upset me, when she says she meant nothing at all, and I find myself lost in the beauty of lyrics to a song I hear on the radio.
I loved words, but I hated my own. I could never speak up in class because I thought I would sound stupid and incoherent. I felt incompetent compared to the students who could deliver an A+ speech in a confident voice. In a debate, I could never win. However, it was different when I put words onto paper. From all the books I had read, I knew I could put words in that special order that I had learned to love. I wished to show people, with a printed paper in hand, that I was someone with a voice.
Years later, almost reaching the age of 30, I haven’t found my voice. It’s still stuck deep inside my mind somewhere, but when I try to pull them out they come out jumbled.
But I love them for the way they are. To this day, I would say I am a person that doesn’t trust those with the loud, confident voice that our teachers valued so much in school. My eyes drift instead to the quiet one, as I watch her mouth twitching as she tries to form a coherent sentence, and I see her mind dancing further and further away. She says something, and her face goes red, but I know that she has not said everything she can. She will go back to her room, and at night, she will speak her thoughts out loud in her dreams.
And to this day, I appreciate a heartfelt letter more than someone’s words thrown at me. I know the hours it must have took to put the thoughts onto a sheet of paper that will last forever—and you can’t take them back. If I had to choose, I would want to be someone who could never win that debate, but write you a letter that you keep in a box that you open once in a while and smile a child’s smile.
Why do I write this? It is something we all know and feel. But not everyone writes them out in words. A writer, regardless of whether they are good or bad, is someone who finds purpose in not writing something extraordinary, but something everyone relates to. Sometimes you read something so obvious, yet you don’t know why you didn’t think of it before. And those are moments in which I find beauty. Moments that make me realize the power of words to organize the chaos of emotions we live amongst.
It could be a Mary Oliver poem. It could be lyrics to a Lauv song. But it’s most likely going to be your favorite storybook that made you cry as a child. I take in the specific order of words that this writer chose and am blown away by the new perspective on life it brings. Realizing that, and writing this at the end of the year 2022, I have never felt happier.
I don’t think I could ever write for a living. But I simply write to live this life to the fullest. Not to turn away from the chaos, the heartbreak and loss, but to learn to embrace it. To look back on this small life that I find so ordinary, and realize it was a melody to that old favorite song of mine.