Words are Meaningless and Forgettable
Enjoy the Silence
By: Jaime Church
Title by Depeche Mode
In 3rd grade a girl told me my pigtails looked like a diaper when I tucked them into my favorite striped hat. In 6th grade a boy called me a bitch because I had gotten 100% on a science quiz. In 8th grade my crush told me he was happy we were assigned together in a group project. Freshman year of college a girl told me I didn’t need to bother to buy Oakleys when I joined the rowing team because they were only meant for the girls who were “good.” Jr. year of college I had a professor tell me they thought I was eloquent. And today, December 8th, 2025, the teenage boy working at Auntie Anne's said they liked the bracelet on my left wrist.
Words are meaningless and forgettable. They come and they go. All they are are soundwaves or symbols on a page. For you right now, they are pixels on a screen. They are random and common. Straight white men seem to have a lot of them. Some people have pretty ones, some people have cruel ones, kids always have the best ones, and most people just have boring ones. Necessary, but ultimately boring. It is a common misconception that words, (and the consequent phrases they form when a group of them decide to get together,) end up cultivating messages or meaning or personality. This is not the case. Yes, they have meaning beyond the actual sounds that come out of one’s mouth or the actual shape of the ink on a page, but only in a sense meant for communication or logical computation. Please do not look beyond what you can hear or see! So yes, while some collections of words can hypothetically be thought of as “bad” or “good,” you can go ahead and end your speculations there. Because if you go any farther than that, you’ll probably regret it. You’ll try to make sense of the bad ones, and revel in the good ones, but it’ll only make every so so much worse. Because at that point you’re giving them attention and attention is time and time is money and you wouldn’t just throw your money down the drain, would you? So it’s time to stop thinking about what everyone has ever said to you. STOP it. You’re silly to care, but the good news is that it’s easy to stop caring.
When your high school running coach tells you no great female runners are over 5 '7 (knowing full well that you are 5' 9,) or when your college ex tells you that you have too high of expectations because you expect kindness to be relatively consistent, I get that it can be a little sour at first. But the great news is that attention is currency and it’s really easy to forget about these sorts of things. Sometimes people just say stuff. Recreationally, even. It’s no big deal. I realize this means that this logic has to apply to the “good” stuff too, but that’s ok, right? You’re strong enough to survive without it, I bet. When that 8th grade crush of mine told me he was excited we were in the same group, it was 6th period, a week before winter break. Our desks were set up in a semi-circle fashion and he was wearing ski pants. Our teacher’s name was Patricia but I noticed some of the other teachers called her Peppermint Patty, and if I cared about words or their meanings, I would find this to be quite tender. She was reading off names of groups and when she read ours he looked up and genuinely smiled and told me he was glad. I was twelve and it genuinely didn’t mean anything then and it certainly doesn’t mean anything now because it was just something random that he said. I went home that day and didn’t do a singular thing out of the ordinary. I do remember that the day was better for some reason, but that reason must have been arbitrary or coincidental, the way God just deals out random headaches and random good moods.
It’s also important to remember that words are forgettable, if you choose. I’m going to forget about that whole thing I told you just now any day. Any day now I’m also going to forget my old running coach, my ex, my professor, the girl from the rowing team, the boy from 6th grade science, and the girl from my 3rd grade class. I can do without the good and I can certainly do without the bad. The problem is just that I have a very busy schedule, and I haven’t gotten around to it yet. Forgetting is easy I bet, (in all honesty, I haven’t done much of it yet,) but it’s very simple and very effective. And once all the thoughts and memories are gone, you can enjoy the silence.