Words

Words can hurt. Shocker, right? Yet I think we all make the mistake of saying that one wrong thing that unintentionally hurts someone.

I personally suffer from chronic foot in mouth disease. You would think I wouldn’t considering my thin skin (the only thin part of me), yet I seem to have a knack for saying the wrong thing, particularly when I try not to. I always feel like shit when I realize it, but you can’t put the genie back in the bottle sometimes.

We all have our trigger points. Perhaps it’s religion or sexuality. Maybe it’s marital status, children or lack thereof, but I have to believe that everybody has that one thing that is a sore spot. Mine, of course, is weight. If you’re surprised, I invite you to go back and read earlier entries of this scintillating blog.

I want to lose weight. Yes, I’m aware of the size of my ass, that my arteries are probably in a very sorry state and that sitting on a hammock would probably not be wise. I’m also apparently very good at talking about losing weight and writing about it, but it’s the actual follow through where I fail.

I see the looks and I know I’m judged, or perhaps I perceive I’m being judged when I’m not. I spent roughly two and a half years in therapy ostensibly because of my screwed up body issues, yet here I am.

I’m a big joker about my weight. Maybe it’s because I was the butt of other people’s jokes in my younger years, but my MO is to get in front of the joke, call out the elephant in the room. The elephant of course being me.

I also have this urge to tell people that I used to be thin. It’s like I’m saying “I’m not really lazy, I’m just going through a rough patch. I wasn’t always like this”. Mind you, most people don’t say anything about my weight to my face (and Lord help them if they did), but I can feel the judgment, real or perceived.

One person in my life does feel the need every so often to make the rogue comment. He once told me I was porky, and tonight made a pointed remark about dieting. What he doesn’t realize is that remarks like that don’t have the intended result. Five minutes after he said it, I made myself a sesame seed bagel with four pieces of bacon. At 10:30 at night. As I was eating it, I knew what I was doing. The eternal 16 year old inside me was flipping the finger. Another part of me wanted to cry.

On a mature level, I do need to do something, I really do. But as I’ve said before, I need to do it my terms, looks and words be damned.

But getting back to my original point, words. To quote George Carlin, “So be careful with words. I like to think that the same words that can hurt can heal, it’s a matter of how you pick them”.