STICKS & STONES
When words hurt, there’s a way to turn the words themselves into the salve, says Lexy Wren-Sillevis in this extract from her book
Astranger called me sexy and it completely changed my life. Words can do that. One word, spoken but once — a complete game-changer. Perhaps that sounds familiar, yet also slightly ridiculous. Well, that’s life, folks, and we live in a very complex world. Here’s how it happened for me. Way back when, I was sitting outside a café with some girlfriends when a man joined us at our table. If he’d been anyone else we’d have stood up and left but he wasn’t anyone else. He’d hopped off a shiny pink bike and sort of glided over to us and was so un-pedestrian and tanned and well, extraordinary, that we were all awestruck. (I know, it doesn’t take an awful lot to impress us sometimes, does it?) Anyway, he sat down and proceeded to enlighten me and my friends on what he thought of our looks and how they would affect our lives. Yep, straight in there. A big, important, unsolicited life lesson from a tall-ish pinkbiked stranger.
“Well, you’re GORGEOUS,” he said to one friend. “Really striking. What a face!” And then to the other friend: “And you’re so BEAUTIFUL I could cry. Oh to be that beautiful! Right?” He turned to me. “Oh, well you are neither beautiful nor PRETTY. But (he held his finger up at this point) you are SEXY! And that will work for you.” I was crushed. Of course I was. Never mind the who and why and what, I had just been pronounced to be sexy, but neither beautiful nor pretty. In front of my friends. By someone who had ascended to godlike status simply by descending from a saddle. I smiled and swallowed it down, pretending it didn’t taste like poison. I bundled it up and put it away.
But putting something away is only ever the thing you do before having to pick it up again. That one word defined the whole of my teens and 20s
I was neither beautiful nor pretty and therefore (or so I thought back then) I must be UGLY. But I was sexy — someone had said so. I had been branded and packaged, and from then on, I believed the writing on the box. I internalised his edict and behaved accordingly. I lost my virginity soon after and spent years thinking that sex — be it good, bad or forgettable sex — was love. Or as close to love as sexyugly me was going to get.
Fast-forward many years to now, and I have two incredible daughters. I also have two decades of dedication to Healing and using the wisdom of Hindsight behind me. High or tipsy as he might have been, inappropriate and downright weird as he definitely seemed when I came to think of it later, I know man on pink bike was wrong. In every single way.
As the saying goes: “Hurt people hurt people”.
And it’s the words they use that hurt us most. In fact, some words are used so frequently, and so casually — and often by people who say they like, or love, or respect us — that we don’t even notice the hurt until some time later. Like jellyfish, these words glide by and only when they’re at a distance do we notice the sting of their tentacles. Words cast spells over us. Words are powerful. In safe hands, and from the sweet mouth, they can coax you into your best self, lift your day, ease your fears. Yet in wounded, suffering, punishing hands they can suffocate and hold us under. They slice into our self-esteem and leave a deep, dark wound.
So when a little while ago, my eldest came back from school, saying that another child had called her a BIG FAT PIG, I wanted to make it better. I wanted to spare her what I’d been through. I didn’t want her spinning the words BIG and FAT and PIG over and over in her head. I didn’t want those words to have even the slightest chance of shaping her life. So I sat and wrote “big fat pig” in large letters and the acrostic wrote itself.
An acrostic is a poem, word puzzle or other composition of words in which certain letters in each line form a word or words. They can be simple and reactionary or loaded with meaning and intention, as I came to discover. The acrostics in this book are both. They take the words, the slurs, the insults and the labels that are thrown at us and break them down, and tear them apart. This book is a righting of wrongs, a rewriting of the words that diminish us. It transmutes and rewrites those words — some with all of the pain they trigger, others as positive affirmations, mantras and poems.
My daughter and I have added other words to our
list: ANNOYING, SNITCH, OVAL HEAD (I mean, really?!) and each time we’ve written an acrostic it has led us to incredible conversations about being human, being brave, life, hurt, purpose, soul. I began to write down every word that had hurt me or my loved ones, and all too easily I got to 60 words. The former journalist in me wriggled free and I set out on a mission to make that list a list of words that are flung at womxn other than me and mine.
Since I began writing, so many womxn have wanted to share their painful words with me; I’ve had so many coffees and late-night chats and e-mails about reclaimed words. And here’s the thing. There are so many words. So many insults and labels and boxes for womxn to be packaged and packed off in. Often, but not always, they’re words coined by men. Why that is, is another book, and is a bigger conversation that is starting to be had by womxn everywhere. We’re slowly, but oh-so-surely, making it clear that there is no man in womxn. We’re writing him out and writing us back in. Not because we don’t love men — they are our divine brothers, fathers, sons, uncles, partners, husbands, friends. But because we are equals and deserve our own terms. Our own words. With a suffix all of our own.
Writing this book has been a huge lesson in a life of them and it has been an incredible and humbling experience. As a colour therapist, energy psychologist, spiritual coach and womxn, I’d like this book to be a tool for your own transformation, change and healing; you opt in as much as you like. Yes, she’s glossy and utterly gorgeous, but she’s also a timeless workbook for feminine healing if you need her — to take the sting and hurt and pain out of the words that have hurt you.
I’ve taken SEXY out of pink bike man’s mouth and UGLY out of my very being. My daughter watched BIG FAT PIG become something so very, very different. And she’s stronger for it. I won’t share BIG FAT PIG here; that one was for my daughter and a gift to her. But the rest are for you.
So here’s to taking back your sovereignty, dignity and divinity. Sticks and stones may break your bones but soon these words will never hurt you.