I’ve always been overweight. Looking back, certainly as a child and a teen I wasn’t nearly as overweight as I thought at the time, but it was enough.  In second grade, there was a spat of particularly hurtful things that were said to me—sometimes by some of the older students, sometimes by my peers.  At times it felt relentless.

That summer, I decided that I needed to do something about it; that I didn’t want to be fat any more and didn’t want anyone to make fun of me.  I figured out that if I just ate less, I would be able to lose weight. So I did.  A lot less.  Anytime my family offered me something, I would tell them I wasn’t hungry.  I would wait until I was absolutely starving, and only then would I try anything.  I vividly remember going to the New York State Fair at the end of summer and the day being consumed by my parents insisting every time we walked by a food stand that I have something to eat, that they were really worried about me.  It was a long struggle of a day for all of us.

Just after the start of school year, one night I asked my mom about how the body functions.  I told her that I was confused why I would go to the bathroom every day even though I didn’t eat that much.  She explained to me that my body needed food for energy, that without food it was simply eating my muscles to create that energy, and that was what I was losing when I went to the bathroom.

I immediately started eating normally again.

***

Those other kids had no idea what their words were doing to me.  They had no clue at eight or nine years old that their torment could cause someone to turn to anorexia at a young age.  Hell, they didn’t even know what anorexia was (I certainly didn’t).  And yet, those words were specifically meant to induce harm…they were a direct attack on another person for the sake of pure enjoyment.  Whether it was out of jealousy or cruelty or disgust, I never really knew. But the rationale really doesn’t matter—the intent was harmful, and the consequences certainly were.

I don’t fault those people.  At this point, I don’t even remember the specific individuals or the comments they made.  I’m sure many of them are still close friends.  But they are close friends because I was one of the lucky ones who lived in a loving, supportive home and was able to discover myself in ways that allowed me to see what I was really capable of, and know that anything hurtful tossed my way was simply not true and wrong.  And wrong things could be ignored and laughed at.  Sometimes, in a sick way, not at but even with.

So I went from becoming anorexic because of kids calling me names to being the person that made the most fun of me.  I’m sure some of that was a self defense mechanism,  but a large part of it came from an abundance of self confidence that decided if these things made other people feel happy,  then I should oblige them, since I had already attained that happiness.  I knew where I stood, and wanted to help others feel good about where they stood.

How We Treat Others

But this post isn’t about abuse, torment, or directed hate.  I tell the story of how I was anorexic before I was 10 to help illustrate what words can do to us as human beings.  They are nothing, and yet they can mean everything.

The sad truth is that words can slap us in the face regardless of who they come from and how they were intended.  The pain they inflict is a direct result of how we personally receive them.  Sometimes we take them lightly with a laugh.  Sometimes they cut us like a dagger straight through the heart.  However they come, it is entirely within our discretion to feel the way we do.  No one else has the exact set of experiences that have led us to this point in our lives, so no one can understand with 100% certainty why we feel the way we do.  Each of us has that right to feel however do, no matter how small or significant the slight.

Which brings us back to the Golden Rule, and treating others as we want to be treated ourselves.  This should not, however, be taken literally when examining specific actions and words, but rather an empathetic examination of what we are doing or saying.  So rather than thinking "I can call this person [slur] because I don't think it's a big deal and it wouldn't bother me if they called me this," our thoughts should instead be "I shouldn't call this person [slur] because that makes them feel the same way I do when someone calls me [other slur]. I do not appreciate feeling that way."

On some level, we all know this and few would disagree.  These actions are simply a common sense of decency that we have signed onto in the act of joining and living in a civil society.  Simply keeping that sense in the forefront of our minds as we interact with one another would contribute a lot of progress toward reducing social pain. 

Just because we can all likely agree on this broader point, it does not mean that the discussion is over.  Liberals reading the above are undoubtedly nodding their heads in agreement, high-fiving each other, ready to remind those that say hurtful things that they are indecent people.  Conservatives are likewise reading this and saying, sure, we agree in principle, but this is not what we're talking about when we fight against political correctness.   I think both sides would do well to take a moment of pause and consider the following.

A Volcano of Words That Hurt

Language, and in particular words that morph into ones that are considered mean or hateful, is a lot like the Hawaiian Islands: they start as a hot spot beneath the surface, at first only a little, but then growing enormously with each eruption of use.  People use terms to describe others; I’m not going to repeat any of them here, but we all know words that were once in vogue to identify people by race or ethnicity or religion that eventually fell out of favor.  As that overall usage increased, so did the likelihood that they were used for ill will, to slander others.  Eventually, like a sea mount, they burst through the surface, out into the open for all to see.

Over time, society comes to view the use of the term as a negative one.  Slowly, like wind and storms and rain and waves we chip away at their usage.  What was once widely used, what had become an island of syntax in our ocean of language, erodes away as we ourselves chip away at it, until finally it recedes back into the ocean, where even the most hateful are unable to use the term any more.

The ground shifts, the hot spot moves on, and new words are created.  The cycle begins anew.

Most of the time, following this cycle, the words that we use are not designed to be hateful and savage, and their use does not in and of itself suggest racism or misogyny on the part of the user.  It is simply the case that amongst ourselves in society, different people find themselves with different opinions about where we are in battering that island away back below the surface.  There are certainly some who mean intentional harm; I do not mean to reduce their culpability.  But there are far more people caught in the middle of the typhoon of change, and we all need to ride it out.

The Terror of the PC Police

Continuing with this analogy for a moment, there has been an increasing movement to prevent that sea mount from bursting through the surface in the first place  and allow the natural course of events to wear it back down.  The intention is well placed: why should we allow people to be hurt by words that we know will hurt them?  Shouldn’t we instead try to limit their use and prevent people from being hurt in the first place?  Why allow pain to occur when we as a collective can stop it?

The truth is, this is essentially an impossible task.  There will always be a word that starts with some letter that will come to be seen as hateful toward a particular type of person.  It is simply a matter of human nature, that there are those in society who denigrate others for any number of reasons. The altruistic idea that we should prevent it is laudable, but folly in its application.

At the same time, those with these laudable goals, who are not-so-affectionately referred to as the “PC Police,” fail to see the very reasonable reality that in a changing society, not all are accepting of change at the same pace.  We may not have personal interaction with someone who is referred to as the “x-word,” and are thus not exposed to the hurtfulness of the term.  That doesn’t make us uncaring or a monster; it simply provides an opportunity to develop those experiences.  But it is also within our nature to retract when attacked, to dig in.  Foisting the terror of the PC Police on everyone actually works against the aforementioned laudable goals.

Simply put, in a world that is changing at an ever-increasing pace, we need to recognize and accept the different speeds at which we all adjust.

Happy Christmas

To this point I have focused mostly on the use of terms to describe others.  But there is other language that features many of these same problems—particularly the fight over the greeting “Merry Christmas.”

As a kid, I remember hearing the phrase "Happy Holidays" quite frequently.  I grew up in a rural, largely white, nearly majority Christian community—I never thought too much about the plurality of holidays during the time of year and whether the phrase was some tacit rejection of the Christian holiday.  To me, it simply acknowledged Christmas and the fact that New Year’s Day was only a week later.

But even in thinking about this issue, in seemingly dismissing the concerns and feelings that others may have, my own thoughts are filled with special times with my family, with the wonders of a season filled with goodies for us as children.  So I get it; there’s a rich cultural tradition that is evoked in those two simple words. 

At the same time, this rapidly changing world around us finds greater diversity among our society and communities.  Where once everyone celebrated Christmas, now there are many other occasions. Again, this change occurs at different paces in different places and for different people.  And as the world swirls around us, it is only natural to anchor ourselves in our own traditions.  They link us to our past, to our parents, and long gone relatives.  For many, those traditions are the very bedrock of who we are.

So it is natural to resist that change.  Just as it is natural that as society grows more diverse the words we use change to reflect that.  Both situations can coexist.  It is how we react to that coexistence that is important.

When You ____ I Feel ____

In middle school I was trained for a peer mediation program that was ultimately never implemented at my school.  But one thing that I have always taken away from that training is the communication tool “when you ___, I feel ___.”  So I close with an imploring that living together in this world of tension, the best way that we can overcome these conflicts is to tray and apply this tool in our daily interactions.

“When you use the term x, I feel like that is a personal dig at me/my family.”

“When you insist that I say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas,” I feel like you are denying the legitimacy of my traditions/family upbringing.”

In an ideal world, we actually have these conversations with others, reaching out and learning from one another.  But it is probably just as important that we have an internal conversation.  When I say this, how does that other person feel?  What is it that would make me feel the same way, and how would I react if someone said that to me?  It is not simply how would we react to being called a particular name, but how would we react to something that makes us feel the same way this other person is feeling.  I’ve often heard people say that others should just “toughen up” in the face of certain words, that those words don’t bother them, so why should they bother others?  However, it is not a toughening up that is needed, but rather some empathy.  We will always have this disunity amongst our communities.  The only way to salve the wounds is to try and consider one another's perspective.  It’s hard work, and we will all fail from time to time.  My own failures undoubtedly discount these words in the eyes of some.  But without that recognition and self reflection, there can be no hope for finding common ground.

In short, we simply need to try and be decent to one another.  We just have to try.