We are the words we choose to use

I sign off almost everything I post with the same three lines. If you have ever wondered why, here it is, properly, once.

We are the words we choose to use. We are every action we choose to undertake. We are everything we choose to create.

It starts with words because words come first. Before you build anything, before you change anything, you say it. To yourself, mostly. In the quiet bit of your head that nobody else hears.

Every word is a seed

Think about the words you use about yourself on a bad day. I can’t. I’m not good enough. It’s always like this. Now think about how many times a week you say them. That’s not a passing thought anymore. That’s a garden you are watering.

Words are vibration. They leave your mouth as sound and they land in someone else’s body. You can feel it when somebody speaks to you with love and you can feel it when they speak with hate. Nobody needs to teach us that. We knew it as kids.

So if words do that to other people, what do they do to us when we say them to ourselves all day long?

Choose, don’t react

The important word in my motto is choose. Most of what we say is not chosen. It’s reaction. Somebody pushes, we push back. The news says be afraid, so we repeat the fear to the next person we see.

Choosing is slower. It means taking a breath before you answer. It means asking, is this word going to build something or break something? Sometimes the true answer is that something needs breaking. Most of the time it doesn’t.

Then the actions, then the creations

Once you choose your words, your actions start to follow them. You hear yourself say I’m going to make something today and then you go out to the shed and you do. That’s how making anything begins. Not with the timber. With the sentence.

And what you make goes out into the world and keeps speaking after you’ve stopped. A staff leaning in somebody’s doorway is still saying something years later. So is a cruel comment under a video. Both are creations. We get to choose which kind we leave behind.

Try this for a week

• Catch one word you say about yourself that you wouldn’t say to a friend. Swap it.
• Before you comment on anything online, read it back once. Would you say it to their face, by a fire, with nothing in your hands?
• Say one true, kind thing out loud to someone every day. Out loud matters.

Nobody can change the world for you. But you can change the words. And the words change everything after them.

We are the words we choose to use…
G-star, Truth Warden Sol