In Words
On naming what institutions won't name for you. How words become the structure that lets you protect what you can't yet explain.
She laughed. “Jimmy,” she said. “She was listening.”
I was six. Black patent Mary Janes. Pink glasses. A purple ribbon barrette I tolerated and white tights I could not breathe in. I loved church. I thought I might want to be a nun. There was something peaceful about it: calm, ordered. I did not believe in God precisely. I believed in a force that could hold all of it: forgiveness and punishment, love and its absence, light and dark.
We came home from Mass and I started singing. “A-women.” Not “A-men.” “Mommy, what about the women?”
She laughed. Redirected it to my father as attentiveness. Not insight. Not perception. “Jimmy,” she said. “She was listening.”
He didn’t engage.
The question went nowhere.
I already knew the difference between being heard and being managed. I just didn’t have the language yet.
Thirty years later I asked my son what his superpower was.
He was two. Deep in the particular rage of being two: frustrated, wordless, on the edge of a tantrum.
Instead of calming him, I asked: “Do you know what your superpower is?”
He said no.
I said: “Your words.”
It became the way we talk in our family. Not a lesson. Just a fact. Your words are the thing that changes rooms. The thing that protects without destroying. The thing that cannot be taken.
I ask my children now what their superpower is.
They both say the same thing.
“My words.”
Not voice. Words. Names and explanations for experiences that did not have them. They already have the answer it took me decades to find.
I spent the years since inside institutions that said language mattered.
I am in a meeting. I raise something. Not loudly. Not as accusation. As observation: a pattern I have watched repeat, named plainly, once. I say, quietly: “We’re measuring the wrong thing.”
The room does not argue with me.
It thanks me for my perspective. It asks if I have considered the full context. It suggests we table this for a smaller conversation, offline, later, with the right people in the room. The right people are never in the room.
Someone reframes what I said as tone. Someone else reframes it as fit. No one reframes it as true or false, because that would require answering it.
I grew up in this room.
My mother laughed. The institution has better manners. Kindness and erasure, in the same gesture.
The question lands nowhere. You are praised for raising it. The structure remains.
My daughter has dyslexia. Her relationship to language is imaginative and rich in ways I am still learning to understand. She sees things I don’t see.
A friend crossed a line. She couldn’t find the word. She could only describe the feeling: unsettled, uncomfortable, a space entered without asking.
I knew it.
“Boundary,” I said.
She stopped.
I explained what it meant. Not because I solved anything. Because now the feeling had somewhere to live.
She understood. Not as a rule. As structure. A fence around you, around your life, that marks where you end and something else begins.
She smiled. Now she had a name for what she needed to establish to protect herself.
Language is the structure. Words are how we move into it.
Every word here took years to build. Not invention. People cannot protect what they cannot name.
That is what this has always been. Not a theory. Not even an essay. An answer. A place to put experiences that had nowhere to live before they had words.
The question my mother couldn’t answer, finally answered.
In words.
Trust the reader. Cut until it hurts. Earn the silence.