August 11, 2014

When I was a little girl my parents got me a whole series of books called "Let's Talk About" which were designed to help small children deal with their emotions and attitudes that can prevent them from becoming responsible young people and eventually responsible adults.

They had titles like "Let's Talk About: Bullying," "Let's Talk About: Feeling Jealous" and other stuff like that. I think about those books a lot and reflect on how they provided an opportunity for me and my parents to have a dialogue that was at my level about complex issues.

While I don't want to talk about those books, I want to use this post as a way of having an open dialogue about something that embarrasses me a lot, and something that I'm hoping to change: my tendency to use words like "retard" and "gay" as derogatory terms in regular conversation.

Kind of like my own personal Let's Talk About.

It seems to me that the reason that we use words like "gay," "retard" and "homo" when we're young is because we hear them and recognize that they're insults, but we're too immature to grasp the larger context of what they mean in our society and how inappropriate it is to say them.

So I grew up using these words and they managed to make their way into my speech patterns as an adult largely because most of the people that I knew still used them.

It's easy to feel like calling someone a retard is okay when everyone you hang out with uses that word all the time.

As we get older we're supposed to learn these rules of social conduct, but many of us disregard them because we haven't grown up enough to realize that it's actually really offensive and hurtful to use that kind of language.

(For example, I used this image as a response in online conversations way more than I care to admit.)

Recently though I've had the opportunity to have some productive talks with different people about using those sorts of words and it's made me think about how frequently I fell back on using them, and the extent to which I defended my so-called "right" to say whatever I want (no matter how hurtful) and expressed annoyance at people being "butthurt" over it.

It's not nice to open your eyes and realize that you acted poorly when you could have made better choices, but that's how we learn and I want to take a moment to publicly apologize to anyone whose feelings I may have hurt with that sort of language: I'm sorry.

I could have acted better, and moving forward I intend to do so.

With that in mind, I'm looking for some help. It's not easy to change our speech patterns, and I would love some input for how to remove these words from my vocabulary. What tips or suggestions do you have?

Thanks in advance!

xox

yr girl Shaner