Something You Love About Yourself

Words. I love the power I have with words. I have the power to move you to tears or make you laugh, to disgust you or enthrall you, inspire or depress you. I have done all these things before, and I shall, hopefully, do them all again.

There are a lot of rules to making words. Do this, do that, transition, topic sentence, thesis, conclusion, etc etc etc. For the most part, however, I ignore those rules. Oh, there are a few I follow religiously (mostly spelling and grammar rules) and some I follow when I feel like it (like the rules for formal/informal writing). There are even a few rules I have made up for myself: whitespace between paragraphs, very few contractions, the most vivid words I can think of.

But for the most parts, my power with words is something instinctual, not contrived. I write the way I do because the words just flow. I run out of words much more quickly when I am trying to fit them to some preconceived pattern. The only exception to this is poetry. Oftentimes with that a couplet starts worming its way through my head, and along the way it picks up some rules. Sometimes it wants to rhyme. Sometimes it most emphatically does not. Sometimes it wants to express itself in two or three syllable lines. Sometimes it wants iambic pentameter (although in general I discover this is what I have written after the fact, not while I am actually writing).

Today, I spent some time reading back through the last year or so of my blog. I wept, I wanted to cut, I wanted to die, I laughed, I marveled, I rose high and fell further. All because of my words. Perhaps it was because they were my own words that they moved me so deeply, but even those who hate me have told me that my words move them.

When I was growing up, I wanted to be good at music. Music is the family tradition, after all. Everyone in my family is musical, except for perhaps my mother, and what she lacks in talent she makes up for in enthusiasm. We are somewhat alike in that way. And while I am competent at playing the piano and clarinet and recorder and singing, I am not talented like the rest of my family. I still haven't gotten over that completely, but somewhere along the way I discovered a talent of my own. Words. I am talented with words in a way nobody else in my family is (though they have their own literary talents, they are different from mine).

Words are my weapon, and I wield them, for good or ill, with power.