Since moving to New York City, something that has struck me is how at pretty much any given moment, you can be surrounded by hundreds of people. Whether you stand in the same spot on the sidewalk for 5 minutes, ride a subway train for a few stops, or walk into a grocery store, there are people everywhere.
As an observer (which is just a really kind way of saying I’m incredibly nosy), I find myself watching all these people all of the time. I watch their mannerisms, I critique their fashion choices, but mostly I attempt to overhear tiny bites of their conversations.
I keep an ear out only for bits: “after we left the park,” “I ordered a coffee for him”, “when I was at NYU”. These fragmented anecdotes provide glimpses into relationships and personalities, allowing my wandering mind to fill in the gaps that were left by the speaker’s strides in the opposite direction. Its a fun way to pass the time.
But while my eavesdropping tendencies since moving to the Big Apple have typically been merely recreational, they lately have been poking at a bigger reality that I find a tad overwhelming: everyone always has something to say.
I don’t mean this in the political sense, like that everyone has a hill to die on or that everyone has a voice that deserves to be heard (which I agree, but that’s not what this post is about). I more mean this in the literal sense: everyone is ALWAYS talking. Look around you while you’re reading this— everyone is having conversations. If they’re not speaking out loud, they are probably having a conversation over text. Everyone on this planet is having constant conversations, and the more I think about it, the more wild that concept begins to seem.
Since I only speak English, we are going to deep dive into the English language.
According to the quick google search I just did, there are 171,146 words currently used in the English language. To put that in perspective, if you ate one box of Oreos (not sponsored but wanted to provide a visual) every week for a year, you would end up consuming an equal amount of calories to words there are in the English language.
That means that every single person is configuring those 171,146 words in their own way. Some people use their 171,146 to be funny, others focus on being informative, some people use them to be political, others use them to be moving, and some people decide they are going to take their 171,146 words and cat call women on the street.
Not only do the 171,146 words rearrange themselves to express various emotions, but each of us individually use our allotted 171,146 words to build our own individual words through the sentences we choose to think and say. These choice sentences then create completely different realities. Both me and the woman living in the apartment next to me have been building our realities with the same 171,146 words, but I guarantee that her word choices have made her reality appear seemingly unrelated to mine.
As I write this post, the point of it has changed multiple times. At the beginning, I planned to write about the insane concept that human beings are ~500,000 years (give or take… google had multiple answers) into having a language and we STILL chit chat all day long. Then I was thinking about how few words there actually are. But now, I realize I want this blog post to be about the beauty of attaching intentionality and ownership to your words; the powerful realization that through your language, you get to build a reality in which you enjoy living.
Language is one of the few things in this world that everyone has equal access too— we are (for the most part) exposed to the same letters, words, grammatical structures. I think that seeing language as currency for curating your reality is a rebellious act of independence and self love.
Thinking about language this way has forced me to make vow for myself: I plan to prioritize this perspective in language as I continue to build a future for myself as an individual and as an adult. I will take the words around me and build an ecosystem in which goodness rises to the top, an ecosystem built upon sentence structures that evoke positivity and excitement.
I will use my 52 boxes of Oreo calories worth of words to narrate my life in a way I am proud of. A life that even resembles an Oreo cookie: well rounded and sweet. I hope this post resonated with you a little bit, and I hope you use your words to build a happy reality too.
I love this