The Story of Words
My room back in college was the seat of intense debates of politics, pop culture, literature, philosophy, sex and anything and everything under the sun, and I feel privileged that I have got a close group of friends who have no filter and no judgement. However, I particularly remember this one conversation, where a friend of mine outraged when he was called “opinionated”.
This was a term I used to refer to my roommate. Not unlike many of us, he was very vocal about his opinion on various issues, small or large. But, the interesting part was that he held to his views quite strongly and usually needed a whole presentation with citations to make him change his mind. Now, watching my friend and my roommate debate on why it was not okay to call someone “opinionated” was oddly confusing. It triggered a conversation on what the word meant to each of them. My roommate took it at face value. Opinionated means that you have opinions on things. But over the course of society and pop culture trends, the word, according to my friend, has taken a different angle as to someone who has opinions of course but also forces it down your throat. My understanding lay somewhere in between, and that generated an image in my head: a mind map.
Now, if you don’t know what a mind map is, it’s basically clouds of texts with tentacles that are supposed to be connecting them. This particular situation, however, unravelled a theory in my brain, that we create a mind map for every word we hear, right from when we can understand them and then make modifications on the map, as we go along. For example, my friend had used the word “mansplain” right up there with opinionated, as though they were two floating clouds of words that were connected.
I was doing the “this or that” questions with someone recently, and I stumbled on the question “birthdays or anniversaries”, and I realized I didn’t really enjoy birthdays. God, the shit that I got for that was astronomical. I felt bad about not enjoying my birthday, which surprisingly the day after my birthday this year lead to an epiphany. In the whole concept of words having their own mind maps by connecting themselves to other words, birthdays and fun were not neighbours. They were distant cousins at the most. Now, of course, a whole lot of shaming, feeling guilty and conversations with my mom, I realized that I was narcissistic and therefore the word “July”, which is when my birthday is, was a neighbour to ‘fun’. As a middle-class child who was forced to become a jack of all trades, juggling extra classes and lessons for extracurriculars, my birthday got flexible. It would move to a weekend in the month, so the word birth-“day” didn’t spark joy, July did.
Disregarding the completely unnecessary anecdote, this led my mind back to the opinionated conversation, and it set the gears churning in my head. So, I started rummaging through the dusty shelves at the back of my brain until I found memories of the word “queasy”. I’m sure that word triggered a gut-dropping feeling in you. Again, mind maps, see? I chose this word because it is the one feeling I hate the most in the world. Heartbreak, I thrive in it. Sadness, we have all been there. The next step to this was to find out what were other words that were neighbouring this horrific one, in my mind.
Dad. Queer. Fat. All these words have their own stories on why they make me queasy. I’m sure you can figure some of it out. Dad, I lost my dad at a very young age. My family decided that it would be a fun thing to teach a 5-year old to lie, on a case-by-case basis. In hindsight, it is a brilliant move to keep a child safe, but young me did not know how to react to how the narrative conveniently shifted in a different environment, and that left me feeling, you guessed it, queasy. Queer, I’m sure you don’t need a story, I struggled with it for around seven years, before my mind said fuck it, but I would be lying that it’s always an uncomfortable setting if I’m not comfortable with everyone there. Fat, again, same old story. 6-year old me was put on a diet given by a dietician who had told me that I had a tendency to get fat and therefore, I must watch what I must eat. The diet lasted ten years, but I still wonder how long its effects will. This again was very medically prescribed; she wasn’t wrong. I genetically have a higher capacity to build up cholesterol, but it’s also left a serious impact where I feel “queasy” when I eat a little more than what I consider normal, which I have been told is actually quite less.
Again, you’re sick of the unasked-for anecdotes, but a common thread here happens to be the fact that all these random words have a common link in my brain — queasy. I’m sure that is convincing enough that every single word that you use in your life has its own story in your brain and maybe it’s high time that you go there and find out what your stories are.
