If grief teaches us nothing else, it teaches us that words make things real. That’s why we don’t want to say that someone has died, that a relationship is over, that we’ve lost our favorite friend or pet or childhood toy. Because if we say it, then it’s true and life will start moving onwards with that as part of the physics of our reality. And if we don’t say it, then it isn’t real yet and we can hold onto the reality we’ve had all along, the identity that doesn’t include loss and change forced upon us.
Saying it out loud makes a think start to take shape. It doesn’t seem like it but that’s because most of the time we think we’re bringing one thing into being when we’re actually creating something else. We complain and complain and wish and wish for things to be different, saying that we wish we were, we wish we had, we wish it were different, we wish things would change, all the time very carefully not saying what we could or should or would do to make that happen. We use words to keep us out of it, allow us to not be responsible for it, keep us from the difficult realities of it and therefore create the identity that we are stuck in this situation that never changes other than adding one more verse each day, one more chapter to the ongoing, never ending, never changing story.
Saying it makes it so. If we start saying that we are going to do something about it. If we say we are going to stop doing what isn’t working, we’re going to do things differently, we are going to make different choices, we are going to act or not act, support or not support, love fully, toughly, deeply, with the strength to move forward, move away, break what long ago had stopped being alive, walk away from what should never have been, start walking towards the goal we’ve known was the real deal since…forever…then we start walking that path and everything around us starts falling into line, breathing a sigh of relief, dancing for joy, releasing the rivers of tears and the roaring of fury that has been bottled up for far too long.
What we say makes things real. Are you ready to speak your truth?