I’ll check my privilege here but I don’t have time for a blog. It’s 12:42 AM on a Wednesday (now Thursday) night. I’ve already stayed up too late working on a graduate school project that I’m behind on. The pressures of work, school, and family feel especially heavy right now. Perhaps it’s a creativity awoken by the confines of the pandemic but a nagging voice in my head is calling me to write. I’ll spare myself and a readership of (likely bribed) friends and family a diary-like recount of my own emotions and analysis of current events. Instead I choose to write about something much more interesting: words, and why they matter.

Over these last months, when life has simultaneously crept painfully by and sped on faster than we could catch it, certain words and phrases people in my own life have used to express emotion, analyze history-making events, and connect with one another have floated to the top of the whirlpool in my head. I have relished in the moments when a particular word or phrase used in one area of my life transcends to another. A work colleague uses an old fashioned idiom during a morning meeting and my mother-in-law to-be uses the same one during a phone call that evening. Instantly, these people, places, and experiences are somehow connected in ways they couldn’t have been before; like two kids holding aluminum cans now connected by yarn. But I’m the only one that can see the string. And that feels somehow so…special. I suppose what I hope to share with you in this blog, dear reader, is that feeling. That exhilarating but sacred feeling when you discover these words and phrases, and the contexts and meanings they carry with them that can connect us all.

So I hope you’ll join me in this journey, amidst all the stresses of life, to look for the small joys in words and how they connect us all.

Words Matter, Matter Words