Words that cut deeper than actions do.
I’ve spent a lot of my life witnessing my reactions to positive and negative words. No matter how old I get or how thick my skin becomes, hurtful words still do what they were intended; Hurt!
I’ve been listening to a lot of young people talk to me about the effects of the words of their guardians, and how it impacts them in their daily struggles. So, I’d like to take this time out to talk to parents especially.
Please, talk to your kids, not at them. There’s a difference between making a declaration and having a conversation. A lot of my down times figuring out life’s needed solutions could have been solved with a simple question from a parent, “what do you really want to do?” Sounds easy right? But it’s rarely ever that.
If you are a parent, you might be judging your kids based on how easy it was for you to choose a career path, or make a lot of your life’s decisions. You might be making these choices based on your personality type, your strengths, and the lack of the weaknesses your child’s personality trait may carry. You could have grown up in a time where building a career was all about having a degree or masters. It’s not as oversimplified these days.
In the information age, there’s a lot more emphasis on the value an individual brings to the table. It’s way more than just having a shining degree. It’s about communication skills, leveraging connections, networking, managing people, dealing with conflicts, anticipating problems, selling oneself, and craftsmanship; a lot of skills you’d almost never come across in your conventional school classroom. The real world is not that forgiving.
So that’s what a lot of young people are dealing with. Finding out that these years of their lives they are giving to this institution, might not amount to much by the time they are done with the giving. This is because they see people with the same degrees not flourishing. They see folks with masters unemployed for the longest time, and they see influencers on social media leveraging their talents and living comfortably. They see people talk about trading forex, cryptocurrencies, and even real estate. They go to church and listen to sermons about finding purpose and fulfilling destiny.
Where do you want to be in the next 5 years or 10? If you do not realize how much pressure these variables and choices are contributing to your child’s reactions, you would tend to be very critical. And by no means should these questions not be asked. It’s more in the manner of asking. Are you seeking faults or answers, exposing problems, or seeking solutions?
There are a lot of options and a lot of choices made or not made that lead to a successful life, and a lot of metrics by which that success is viewed. You might see your Medical Doctor Son as an achiever, while that same person can see himself as a failure, knowing he barely made it out and isn’t sure he’d trust himself with making decisions that have human lives in the balance.
How much time have you spent knowing what paths your kid wants to follow, what their dreams and aspirations are, or if they feel they match up to the friends or peers they constantly compare themselves to? Personally, I have switched career paths at different times in my life, and it’s been a function of what I was going through at the time and what I felt was possible.
Parents think they are the only ones comparing their kids but in actuality, society already is; social media and its numbers, social class, and standings. You might be using your words to fuel a dormant fire.
I’ve listened to a lot of young people talk about the pain they are dealing with based on what they heard a parent say and how much it hurts to not be able to confide in them because they already know how they’d react.
Kids rarely ever forget. I remember a lot of the words that have pierced my heart growing up. A lot of them, I still have to deal with as an adult. Some things, I’ve only been able to forgive recently but are still difficult to let go of.
Homes are full of potential. Every individual based on the words they are raised on can tilt towards good or evil. While there are choices we make for ourselves, the words of the people we value can push us in one direction or the other.
In my second year at the university studying to be a physicist, I became really passionate about how websites are built and how I could learn to create the objects of my passion. I was very into it at the time and I was able to get my hands on a Macromedia Dreamweaver course. I spent the next two months learning all I could. When I got confident enough with what I had learned, I started trying my hands on projects outside the course outline.
After several failed ideas, I found one I was excited about pursuing. Over the next two weeks, I built a website that had a collection of my favorite flash games. I was really looking forward to sharing it with a lot of people and seeing if I could expand it and probably find a free host or do it locally. I shared what I had created with my best friend at the time. I knew I hadn’t mistakenly created the next Facebook or Napster so I didn’t set my expectations too high. But when he hit me with the “What am I supposed to be looking at, cuz if this is it, it looks really crappy”, I was really taken off the train track. After what felt like an eternity he handed me back my laptop and left, not before adding other comments about how it wasn’t looking like something he’d try out or spend time with.
Logic dictates I take the not so great feedback and make something better out of it, or get a different opinion, but at the time I had a very emotional reaction to a logical situation and deleted the project altogether. In my mind, I felt if my best friend couldn’t see the potential, what was the point of making it. My esteem couldn’t handle the expectations that got shut down.
If I could have such a reaction from the words of a friend, imagine what that of a parent could do. Imagine how many dreams and ideas lay dead at the feet of hurtful words.
I no longer feel the need for validation when pursuing creative endeavors and it took me three years from that point to get back into web design. A part of me wonders how things could have been if those words were never said.
If a stranger, screams at me that I’m stupid, I can brush it off as nothing. But when my significant other says it with a calm tone, it’s a different story entirely, because the weight we attribute to words is based on how high we value the opinion of who’s saying them. And that’s why we tend to believe those words even when we know they are wrong.
The bright spark to this story would come later on with how I handled my early conversations with Kalu Godswill. A lot of the questions he used to ask felt very fundamental and sometimes stupid and annoying. But I was able to speak to my ego and wonder to myself, this individual has access to one of the most powerful search engines on the planet, but he’s choosing to ask you these questions.
All I could do from then on was answer as honestly as I could, and I began to realize that the questions that annoyed me the most were things I had forgotten, or things I thought I had understood in the past but only grasped at surface level.
Parents wonder how that amazing, bright kid became this gloomy teen and are upset without questioning how they got there. Your kid’s life doesn’t revolve around you. They have their own world and things happen to them in it. How much you know of those happenings depends on the relationship they have with you. Do they let you know little, a lot, or nothing? Do they share stuff with you or with other kids like themselves?
A lot of people ask themselves how valid the advice their parents leave them actually is in the real world, how much of it is tested.
How much can they let you know about the effectiveness of your methods without it becoming a one-sided battle of egos?
It’s never too late to start up this conversation. I recently watched Hennessey's “The Conversation” Series that featured Vector and M.I. While in the end, it felt a tad bit corny, it just showed that for whatever reason that led to that point, they both were willing to sit in the same room and have a conversation on screen. They were at least able to set aside years of differences to come to that conclusion. How many parent and child pairs need such third party interventions? Would each party even be willing when that call comes?
I know I have spent quite a bit of time focused on parents, but hurtful words can come from relatives, siblings, colleagues, friends, and well-wishers too. You never know how close to giving up people are. Be mindful of not being the one that pushes them off the edge.
I couldn’t cry when I lost my uncle Felix. Asides from being numb to my emotions at the time, my heart couldn’t process the loss. Close to his passing, the time shared between him and I were not pleasant ones.
He was always comparing me to my cousin, Kevwe. After two years of constantly hearing how much I wasn’t as awesome as Kevwe, I spent as much time as I could away from him altogether. When I got the news, sad as I was, a part of my mind felt relief “at least, I don’t get to deal with the constant comparison anymore”.
I know it does seem cruel sharing this, but at the time the hurt from the criticism superseded the loss I felt knowing I wouldn’t get to see him again. And now I wish the memories I had of him weren’t the unpleasant ones that were very close to the surface.
If you are dealing with hurtful words from a critical parent or those from family or friends that don’t understand your dreams, don’t limit yourself to these people.
Find folks that ignite your passion and fuel your dreams. People that believe in you; way more than you believe in yourself. But as much as people can help with their belief in you, a lot can be said about your belief in yourself and your self-esteem.
My saving grace has been knowing Christ, for that relationship has helped with letting go of a lot of the hurtful words that have been said to me over the years. That said, these days I take solace in knowing the master of the universe thought it worth the world’s time to let me see a new day, I’m worthy of that gift and merit of that blessing.
Lanre did tell me a long time ago that when the heart harbors pain it shrinks around that pain, but the pain is like a pellet grenade, when it bursts, as a result, it splatters and there are a lot of unplanned casualties.
Our conversation led to me having the sit-down with my dad I referenced in my previous post. Sometimes, it might take you to start that conversation. But don’t ignore the pain, because if you do, it ends up coming up somewhere else unrelated to its source. Might just be you lashing out at a colleague at work, a subordinate at church, your partner, or friend.
So take out time to start these conversations or address your hurts so you can start your journey to healing. Till the next one, stay blessed folks.
