Words Can Break Something We Thought Was Safe

There are some words you hear once and somehow, they never leave you.

They return when you are driving. They appear when the room is quiet. They come back when you are lying in bed, replaying a conversation you wish you had never heard, not because the words are necessarily true, but because someone said them with enough certainty to make you question yourself.

Everyone gets talked about that is a part of human interactions. Words will be shared about someone else's life, their finances, their choices, and what supposedly has ever been achieved over many years of this walking life.

Although I know that words spoken about us are not automatically the truth, I would be lying if I said they do not hurt; they do.

Looking at a Life from the Outside

We have become remarkably good at measuring people's lives by what we can see.
The house, the car, the job, the bank balance, and the possessions.
We tend to look at what someone has accumulated and decide whether their life has been successful, but what we see is rarely the whole story.

With this said, my partner Akin has lived through things that could have broken him.
He became seriously ill many years ago, lost his home after more than ten years, lost his employment, and had to rebuild his life from a very different starting point, and he eventually found his feet again. Not everything that returned to him was what it had been.
Life doesn't always give us back exactly what it takes away. But Akin carried on and stood on his feet again.

Then, some years later, cancer entered his life again; this time it was prostate cancer, but thankfully, treatment is working and he is doing well.

But when I hear someone reduce a life like that to the words, "You have worked all these years and have nothing to show for it", I cannot help wondering what we have become, and what exactly do we think someone is supposed to have to show for surviving?

What Do We Really Have to Show for Our Lives?

Perhaps we have misunderstood the meaning of success.

Maybe what we must show for our lives is not always something that can be photographed.

Maybe it is the resilience and standing up after losing almost everything.
Maybe it is finding reasons to keep going when life has given you every reason to stop.
Or maybe it is the people who stay, and maybe it is the person you became after life humbled you.

We don't know what battles someone has fought simply by looking at what they own, sometimes the people who appear to have the least are carrying stories of survival that would humble those judging them.

Words About Me

I would like to say that things I hear said about me don’t matter, but indirectly they do, as much as it says a lot about the other person than it says about me.

Currently I am not employed, and because I am in a relationship that is long-distance, it was said that I have nothing to offer to being in such a relationship, and that someone else could supposedly do a better job of looking after my lover than I currently can do, apparently do a better job than i could.
I found myself thinking about these words far more than I wanted to.

I began asking myself questions I had never needed to ask before.

Do people really see me that way?
What do I actually contribute?
And that is the frightening thing about words: someone can make a judgement about you in a few sentences, and suddenly you can spend days defending yourself to a person who isn't even in the room.

I had to remind myself that someone else's opinion of me does not become my identity simply because they expressed it confidently.

Of Being Judged

There is something particularly painful about being judged by the things you do not have.

Things like employment, money, possessions, and status.
I tell myself that relationships have never been built entirely on those things and people don't stay beside each other because of a payslip.

People stay together because someone listens, because someone cares, because someone remembers, because someone makes them laugh, because someone is there when life becomes difficult, and because someone sees them when they feel invisible.
There are things we contribute to another person's life that will never appear on a balance sheet and perhaps those are sometimes the things that matter most.

Betrayal Is a Different Kind of Pain

It hurts most not simply because of what was said; it is who it apparently came from, when someone has been a part of your life for decades, the trust becomes almost invisible, one can stop thinking about it because you assume it is there. It could be your parents, best friend, or your siblings and memories and experiences shared, moments of laughter, arguments, difficult moments, and countless conversations, and you build a version of that person in your mind.
You believe you know who they are.

Then something happens that makes you question whether the person you trusted has been seeing you differently all along, and that is where betrayal becomes so painful.
You don't only question what was said; you start questioning everything around it.

How long have they felt this way?
What else have they said?
Were the conversations we shared ever what I thought they were?
Did they support me to my face whilst laughing about me behind my back?

Those questions can be more painful than the original words because once trust is damaged, it is not easily repaired by simply saying, "I didn't mean it."

We never really know what people say when we leave the room and that thought can be uncomfortable, although we would like to believe that the people closest to us speak about us with the same kindness they show us when we are present and sometimes they do, sometimes they don't, and perhaps that is one of the difficult truths of being human.

We will never know every conversation that happens when we are not there, and we cannot control every opinion or correct every misunderstanding. We also cannot defend ourselves against every story someone tells about us, and at some point, we have to accept that people are entitled to their opinions, even when those opinions are cruel. But we are not obliged to carry them.

Someone Else's Words Are Not Your Mirror

I think this is the part I am still learning: when somebody says something cruel about you, your first instinct can be to prove them wrong, and you want to produce evidence or explain yourself. But you also want them to understand that they have got you completely wrong, but perhaps that gives their opinion too much power. Because the more time we spend trying to convince someone of our worth, the more we risk forgetting that our worth was never theirs to determine.

I am learning that I do not have to be employed by someone or some company to have value.
I do not have to own certain things to have value.
I do not have to live in the same country as the person I love to make that love meaningful.
I certainly do not have to accept somebody else's description of me simply because they chose to say it.

Some Words We Carry. Others We Put Down.

There is no pretending that words don't hurt; they do. Especially when they come from people we trusted and when they touch the insecurities we rarely admit to having, and especially when they make us question whether the people around us see us at all.

But perhaps healing begins when we stop asking,
"Why did they say those things about me?"
and start asking,
"Why should their words decide how I see myself?"

I cannot control what someone thinks of me and cannot undo the words that have already been spoken, but we can decide what happens next, and we can grieve the trust that has been damaged and acknowledge that those words said did hurt.

We can allow ourselves to be angry and eventually, we can put down the words that were never ours to carry in the first place.

Because a person's life cannot be reduced to what they own, and a relationship cannot be measured by the distance between two countries. A person's worth cannot be calculated by their employment status.

Perhaps there is another lesson in all of this: we cannot always stop people from telling their stories.

What we can do is make sure we never start believing them.