I Am Bad With Words
If I had to give you five words to describe myself, those five might be the ones I’d choose. Maybe. I’m honestly not sure though, because... well, I’m really bad with words.
This problem manifests itself in a variety of unfortunate ways.
In conversation, certainly. I'm not a particularly sharp speaker, and I tend to pick the wrong words when only the right ones will do. You can imagine the sorts of frustrations that could cause in one’s social life. But the issue is also present in my reading and writing habits and abilities, which is equally frustrating. If you'd known me as a boy, you'd probably be as surprised about it as I am.
Reading and writing came easy as a kid. My mom likes to tell a story about me sputtering one-syllable baby babble one day, then conversing in complete sentences of adult dialogue the next. I don’t remember that, but I do remember doing my older sister’s English homework and devouring books that were far too advanced for my age group. My dad read good books often, and he did what he could to share those habits with me too.
I tested at a tenth-grade reading level before I left kindergarten. They moved me straight to second grade. My elementary-school English teachers were passionate about reading, and they were instrumental in my early love of books. My middle-school Literature teachers were a trio of grammatical warlords who made me diagram sentences until my fingernails bled, and there was some decent value in that too. In high school, I didn’t miss an 800 Verbal SAT score by very much at all. I'm pretty good at the Scrabble, ladies.
I truly don’t say these things to brag. Except for the Scrabble bit. But these early, easy successes ended up creating a lot of trickle-down frustrations later in school.
I skipped first grade entirely, so I never really learned how to physically write very well at all. To this day, my penmanship is pretty embarrassing. Having poor handwriting made me reluctant to take good notes, and the fact that I wasn't being challenged made me disinclined to even go to class in the first place. I slacked off a lot, with very little penalty. The skip also made me a year younger than my classmates, and I was already on the younger side because of a May birthday. I graduated high school just a couple days after my 17th birthday, and there was always just a bit of social incongruity between me and my peers.
All of those lazy habits finally caught up with me in college, where the reading and writing assignments did pose a legitimate challenge for the very first time. By then, though, I didn't have enough of a foundation to succeed, or enough love of learning left to really care. My scholastic life pretty much fell apart.
So, that childhood success story was a bit of a sham. Despite being pretty good at reading and writing by all accounts, recent evidence is contradictory. I fell out of practice. I stopped doing either of them for pleasure, and that’s truly lamentable. Reading and writing are two crucial ingredients in the composition of an intelligent human being. Some of the people I look up the most do both avidly, and I see gaps in my own life from their absence. I feel like I'm getting stupider, in other words.
And it’s not that I don’t like reading and writing. I like them both. But I usually don’t enjoy reading the things I’ve written. I’m a raging perfectionist with an inferiority complex, a bad combination for a would-be writer. I’m also a pacifist, so I just don't feel compelled to share my thoughts on many issues. When I do have an interest or an opinion about something, I often feel like I’m too uninformed to add anything meaningful to the conversation.
There's that little inferiority complex again, but it's only realistic. I mean... I like to cook, but I wouldn’t presume to tell you the best way to roast your chickens. I know my way around the poker table too, but you wouldn't want to use my hand histories as a learning tool. I’ve always had the desire to write, but i’ve just never had much to write about.
Maybe that's changing. I've had an unusual amount of free time lately, and it's given me the opportunity to relax and reflect on myself a bit. I'm essentially alone in life, and that's mostly by choice. I'll even convince myself that I prefer it that way sometimes, but it means I don't have many outlets for the thoughts that have been piling up inside my head lately. I have a fair amount going on personally and emotionally, and frankly, I need someone to talk to, even if that person is myself.
Sometimes you just need to stand in the middle of a wide-open space and scream at the top of your lungs, and this is my place to do that. I don't intend to share this page overtly, but I don't want you to feel unwelcome here either. Please do feel free to lurk around and join in this little conversation with myself, either by using the comments feature or by reaching out through social media.
Stay tuned.
