I had once written about a few instances of how the ‘talker’ in me was cut short quite curtly or made to feel embarrassed for talking by people, some very close to me at the time. The link to that blog is given below.
While this blog had a brief account of how pissed or bad I felt during such instances, I never really acknowledged how badly it had affected me. Worse yet, how badly I am still affected by those memories. I first acknowledged the deep hurt during a session with my therapist sometime last year or the year before. I don’t remember how we stumbled on this topic. When we did, I just let out all the embarrassment and all the sadness that I had buried deep inside me, but still impacted my thinking and my actions every day.
I think, think again and overthink even more after every single conversation I have with anyone other than Hari and my girls. Every chat with an acquaintance or a neighbour, every discourse on a WhatsApp group with a few close friends, every meeting with a new person is always followed by hours of self-inflicted torture. The base of this torture is always the same—‘Did I talk too much?’, ‘Why did I have to talk so much?’, ‘Why did I have to extend the conversation instead of saying bye at the first pause?’, ‘Did I make a fool out of myself?’, ‘Are they judging and mocking me now for yapping unnecessarily?’, ‘Was I too loud?’
Both this extreme overthinking and resultant self-bashing have their roots in countless comments that were directed at me over a lifetime, cutting me short or embarrassing me for how I talk. These comments started coming my way from the time I was a little girl—‘Will you stop talking now?’, ‘How much longer will you blabber?’ But the most hurtful of these comments came in college, which I had written about in the above-mentioned blog.
‘I remember my ex-boyfriend back in college looked at me once with a pretty sly grin when I was telling someone else something, I don’t remember what. I asked him why he was looking at me like that. He told me without thinking for a second how I would feel, “You talk so much and so loud to get a lot of attention, don’t you?” I froze for a moment and then walked away, to cry in the washroom. I never talked to him about that ever again.’
I am sure he didn’t mean to hurt me, at least not to the extent it did. But it cut deep into my mind and made me overthink a whole lot more from then on—something that never stopped. Yesterday I was taken back to the very same point of hurt, surprisingly by the same person—yet again, an unintentional move, I know. We were discussing something serious in the WhatsApp group where it is just a handful of close friends from college. That is, in fact, the only WhatsApp group that I am active on. While we were elaborating a particular point during the discussion, I sent a few messages one after the other explaining my perspective. Then I looked at the messages and told myself that I shouldn’t have rambled. So I added a disclaimer, ‘Sorry for the rambling’ with a one-line explanation for that. A little later I happened to see that this friend of mine had put my messages on ChatGPT and posted a slightly abridged version of the whole thing in the group.
I know that it wasn’t something to be taken seriously and it was in no way an offensive move. But at that moment, I was back in college, crying in the washroom about a comment that came from the most important person in my life at that point. And while he is now just a friend whose comment I can choose to ignore, that act of indirectly saying that I am a rambler, maybe an attention-seeking one as he had once told me, tore open the scar of long ago, and the wound felt as raw as it did back then. Yeah, a simple ChatGPT post crafted using my messages made me cry for a while.
I guess what I am trying to say is that people do not really know or think about the power of their words, the sheer impact they can make in someone’s mind with some supposedly harmless words. But at the end of the day, those comments can stir up a whirlwind in the mind of the affected, even decades later.
Now, when I am blessed with a partner who is in no way ashamed of me and adores me for the way I talk, I still get affected by the words or perceived reaction of those who do not really matter. You could imagine the fragility of human mind and the long-standing impact of words from that. Maybe that is one of the reasons for my blogs being extra-long ramblings, acting as a sort of vent. Because here I am free and I can ramble on without worrying about being judged or mocked for it, just like when I talk to Hari.
There is a silver lining to this though. Because I have been at the receiving end of such comments and understand their impact, I am very mindful of how I am with my kids, both of whom are chatterboxes like me. I never want them to feel ashamed of speaking their mind or talking passionately on things they feel strongly about. If I have to correct them on what to speak and where, that would never be by shaming them for being themselves. So yet again, I guess my wounds are coming in handy in some way for my girls.
Also published on Medium.
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